Review Product Close Up

The card itself has a blue PCB which is nice to see as it simply looks a lot better than the standard green affair that some nVidia cards suffer from.

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One of the first things you notice about this card is it's size; it's tiny! Below is a picture of it compared to a 6600GT from Leadtek. As you can see, the 8600GT is about half an inch smaller than this already quite tiny card. This GPU should be excellent for shuttle PCs.

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The 8600GT features a petal style cooler with a centralized fan that draws air in and blows it over a heatsink (or vice versa) that sits around the fan in an almost complete circle. Incidentally, this cooler is not all Galaxy; the fan is made by Coolermaster

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One difference this cooler has over other petal style coolers is that it has a plastic shroud to make sure air is directed by the fan straight over the fins of the heatsink; this should aid cooling of the card.

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A lot of aftermarket coolers on GPUs require their own power source from a 4pin molex or 3pin fan header. This can be quite annoying for anyone, but especially those trying to have a tidy looking case or those simply wanting better airflow through careful cable management. Fortunately, Galaxy have thought of this and have simply powered the cooler from a 2pin header on the card itself.

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The back end of the card has a single DVI and a single VGA connector which seems strange as twin DVI ports and a converter or two is usually the order of the day. Obviously Galaxy assumes that those buying this card might have older monitors with VGA connectors.

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At the front end there is the SLI bridge connector which allows for two of these cards to be connected together for extra performance. Unlike the higher end 8 series cards, this one only has a single connector, suggesting this card will not be compatible with nVidia's future plans for tri-SLI.

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The back of the 8600 shows that the cooler is held on with 4 very flushed screws which is nice to see, as that means this card has a true, single slot cooler.

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