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In English
Suomeksi
The Card
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Like most of the 8-series cards so far, also the Foxconn 8600GTS uses the nVidia's reference layout and cooler. Most of the frontside of the card is hidden under the one slot cooling solution. Besides that there's very limited number of components and a PCI-e power connector. Nvidia has stated that the maximum power consumption of the 8600GTS is 71 watts and the PCI-e standard says that the maximum power for the connection is 75 watts. According to these values it should be possible to use the 8600GTS without the extra power, but as it's so close call I'm happy to see the additional power connector in this card. Also overclocking increases the power consumption, so the extra power will really come in hand later. |
The backside of the card has nothing special as all the memory chips are hidden under the cooler. The cooler
is held in place by four screws, which is a good and solid method. From this image you can see that there's a
tiny flaw in this particular card. It can't be slotted in before cutting away the excess bit of PCB that's still blocking
the locking gap. Note to the quality control guys! 
Removing the cooler reveals the GPU and the four memory chips. The G84 chip is revision A2 and made on week 10. The memories are Samsung's 1 ns (1 GHz) models. The reference clocks for the 8600GTS are 675 MHz for the core and effective 2000 MHz for the memories. Foxconn follows the reference design here as well and hasn't overclocked their card.
On paper the OC potential of this card seems pretty limited as the memories are already pushed to their specified maximum frequencies and the GPU is running at higher frequency than the same chip on the 8600GT. On the other hand some manufacturers have already released their overclocked versions of the 8600GTS using the stock cooler, so maybe this card could be a pleasant surprise.
Cooling
Coolers are always compromises between performance, size, noise and price. Compared to the G80 series the G84 chip doesn't heat up that much, so the cooler doesn't have to be too large either. 8800 series coolers are known to be fairly quiet ones, so hopes are high that this one will not be a noisy one either. The 50 mm radial fan is located to the front end of the PCB and it blows air through the aluminum fins to the back of the card. The cooler doesn't require extra card slot so the heated air doesn't get straight out of the case. This is a downside, but then again it's good when you can slot a PCI-card right under the PCI-e slot. Closer inspection of the cooler shows that there's also two heatpipes which transfer the heat away from the GPU and share it more evenly around the heat sink.
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