Related Articles

Gigabyte decided to switch it up a bit with their 7600 GS. They decided to follow Nvidia's reference design for passive cooling but used their own heatsink. At first glance it may seem like the large heatsink is made of copper but really it's just aluminium with a slight orange hue. The heatsink also has a heatpipe (that looks reminiscent of a padlock from a top side view) which channel heat from the core outwards and disperse it out evenly throughout the fins.

Nvidia's reference design made it possible for a passive cooler to exist on regular 7600 GS since core clock speeds were set at a relatively low 400 Mhz, but Gigabyte decided to bump up their core speed to 450 Mhz. The 7600 GS also sports 5 vertex shaders, 12 pixel shaders and 12 texture units. The increase in speed is relatively minor, so while it will help a bit with framerates during gaming, it isn't high enough to overload the passive cooler. It does make it hot though which I'll get to later. For the RAM on this board, Gigabyte used Hynix DDR2 memory chips rated for 2.5ns which run at 800Mhz and do not have much room for overclocking. A few features the card has that are similiar with regular 7600 GS are SLI capability (although buying two of these cards would not be very cost effective), S-video out and PCI Express. So really, what differentiates this card from other 7600 GS is its extra connectivity.

Above all else, the main attraction of this card is the HDMI port. While thought as more of a video transfer medium, HDMI actually has enough bandwidth to send HD quality video and sound through seperate channels (approximately 5 gigabytes per second). The Gigabyte 7600 GS has an audio header which works in conjunction with the HDMI so that it can handle the transer of both video and audio. The cable which connects the 7600 GS to your sound card via S/PDIF is like the ones you might find attached to your optical drives. On the video side, the 7600 GS comes fully capable of handling high resolutions. With a maximum resolution output of 2048x1536@85Hz, the card should be handle any 1080p TV.

One thing we've noticed during testing the 7600 GS was how hot the heatsink would get. Without a fan, the heatpipe was scorching on load.  While benchmarking the card, the heatsink was overwhelmingly hot to the touch but the system seemed stable enough to complete all the benchmarks without crashing. The only kind of systems I'd worried about putting this card in are HTPC or home theatre setups with limited ventilation. In confined spaces, this card could definitely turn up case temperatures by more than a few degrees if it's on load for long stretches of time. While HTPCs seems like the best case scenerio for this card, you should still be wary of the fact that the 50Mhz core speeds bump may be causing it to run hotter than usual. While the 7600 GS's passive cooler shouldn't be running as hot as it does, the trade off of excessive heat in exchange for extra power is feasible since the card is still stable.  Keeping in mind also that Gigabyte intends for this card to target an HTPC application where the majority of the workload is watching movies you can assume that the temperatures shouldn't be as big a concern since in such use the card will not approach anywhere near the load of actually full on gaming.