Holy freaking circular objects, Batman!
If you couldn't tell already, this card is a source of amusement around the Labs. The circular cooler, essentially a radial finned aluminium block with fan, has two plastic tabs that are useless if not for making the card look slightly wonky. The good thing about this cooler, however, is that the air is blown through the fins directly at the memory chips, keeping them nice and cool, and also over the small heatsink over the power regulation. While temperature readings refused to behave on the supplied modified CCC 8.10 drivers, the heatsink became slightly warm under load, but the rest of the card remained pleasantly cool, with only 60dBA noise generated.
The core in this card is a strange beastie. It has twice the shader units of the next step down, but only 140 less than the next step up. These run at a very slow 575MHz, but have 512MB of fast GDDR3 at 900MHz on a 256-bit bus - this is plenty of memory bandwidth and space for the vast majority of gaming needs out there. It is still built on the same 55nm process as the rest of the four series cards.
Two plain-Jane DVI ports and analogue video are present, as well as Crossfire tabs to run two of these in unison to improve performance. Oddly, there are three electrolytic capacitors used on the card - surely it isn't worth adding in the potential risk over spending the slight extra on dependable solid caps?
Performance in games is very good - each was extremely playable, devouring our benchmarks with a zealous appetite. You will be very happy with this card for all current games on the market, as long as you're willing to turn a few settings down from time to time.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012