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The Card

First and foremost, this card is in Gigabyte's trademark blue that we all know so well. Length-wise, it is identical to our reference NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT PCI-Express, and about 1.4" longer than a reference 6600 GT PCI-Express. Height-wise, the three cards are all identical.

The Gigabyte GV-3D1 sports a single-slot, dual-fan cooling solution, with a long, gold-colored aluminum heat sink. There is a much smaller, separate heat sink over two voltage regulators. The fan blades are oriented differently - the assumption is that the fans are also trying to push air out the sides of the heatsink and not just the top.

The GV-3D1 also lacks an external MIO (SLI) connector. Seeing as how the card does house discrete GPUs, we assume that the MIO is built directly into the PCB itself. It seems like either it is currently not technically feasible to have dual dual-GPU video card, or Gigabyte has merely decided not to implement such a feature. Regardless, this is something we'll be keeping an eye out for. Having two such video cards would surely put some of you out there into spasms.

Unlike the reference 6600 GT, Gigabyte's 3D1 has an external PCI-Express power connector because the power draw of two 6600 GT GPUs is too great to be supported by the PCI-Express slot alone. NVIDIA recommends a quality 350W PSU for non-6800 Ultra SLI rigs. There is no other special power requirement for this card.

Connectors on the card include one PCI-Express external power connector, one analog VGA connector, one DVI VGA connector, and one S-Video-out connector. The card is a bit heavy, but not quite as much as the Gigabyte GV-N68128DH, or even the reference GeForce 6800 GT.

As mentioned earlier, the entire contraption runs at a blazing fast core clock of 500 MHz, and DDR clock of 560 MHz (1120 Mhz) using 1.6ns GDDR3 whereas the standard memory on stock 6600GTs only use 2.0ns (1000Mhz) GDDR3.

The Bundle

Gigabyte is planning to bundle this card together with their GA-K8NXP-SLI motherboard as a kit for around $550 USD (MSRP). This bundle is expected to be available in retail in the US on January 20th, 2005. At the moment, Gigabyte does not plan on selling the card separately from the motherboard, as special BIOS support is needed for the 3D1. For this reason, the 3D1 will not work on any other board out there. Gigabyte is considering support on some of their other motherboards but it remains to be seen which if any will get them. We'll be going over all of the extras and accessories provided with the kit in forthcoming review of the motherboard, but a quick mention of the video card-related accessories is warranted.

Similar to many other Gigabyte bundles, the video card came with a DVI-to-VGA adapter, video dongle for S-Video and component outputs, and two full games are included - Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising and Thief 3: Deadly Shadows.