The Heatsink

It took just another four screws to remove the tinted plastic shroud off the cooler. With the shroud out of the way, you can clearly see the design of the heatsink. As you can see, it uses a much simpler design than the heatpipe cooler used in the GeForce 7900 GTX.

Screws holding the shroud in place	With the shroud off

It essentially consists of a solid copper base and about 44 rows of fins created by folding a thin piece of copper and then soldering the whole thing onto the copper base.

The heatsink	Spacer under the heatsink

To allow easier installation as well as prevent any damage to the GPU, the copper base comes with several spacers to keep it at a fixed height over the card PCB. Unfortunately, whoever created this heatsink didn't take the same amount of care in polishing the base. We can clearly see machining marks across the entire base.

Graphics Memory

The GeForce 7600 GT comes with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. This reference model used four Samsung K4J52324QC-BC14 memory chips, each with a capacity of 512Mbits or 64MB.

The BC14 speed grade is the third-fastest speed grade for this memory chip, specifying a maximum frequency of 700MHz. Although that's exactly what the GeForce 7600 GT memory clock runs at, the fact that this model has been speed-graded up to 900MHz does give it some overclocking possibilities.

The four memory chips are all placed on the front of the card, arranged in an L shape around the GPU. However, they are not attached to the GPU cooler although two chips are directly in the pathway of the cooler's exhaust.