The 8800 Ultra

The card itself is also pretty standard. The cooler is the same, as well as the black PCB with aluminium heatsink. They could have at least put a custom PNY sticker on it.

Still, I'm a little disappointed that I have this rather stock looking Ultra, as I know there are Ultras from PNY that feature a very cool "V8" logo and a special gold design.

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The sticker is central to the coaxial fan that pulls air from inside the case and blows it backwards across a large internal heatsink.

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The air then travels across the internal heatsink which is fed by the heatpipe you see below. Heatpipes transfer heat faster than standard blocks of copper of aluminium and are used to quickly move the heat from the heatsinks core to the large surface area fins. To read more about heatpipes, check out our glossary entry here.

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Towards the rear of the cooler are some gaps in the shroud which gives you a look at the heatsink fins beneath.

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The back of the card has the typical twin DVIs and a single SVideo connector. There's also a funky PNY sticker and the grill on the exhaust section of the cooler.

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At the "top" of the card are the twin SLI bridge connectors. Currently you only need one for SLI to work, but having two provides compatibility for Tri or Quad SLI; should the drivers ever be finished.

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At the other end of the card you have the dual 6pin PCI-E connectors.

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The shroud around the cooler is a little different from those used on the GTS and GTX models, in that the "front" of the card is open ended which means the fan also draws air from the front, pulling it across the PWM area of the card. Due to Ultras having higher clocks than their GTX counterparts and probably slightly higher voltages, the extra cooling at the front end is necessary.

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Before moving onto the installation, I wanted to have a look at the card underneath the huge cooler, so I flipped it over to get at the mounting screws. All of which are low profile so as to not cause any clearance issues when installed.

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After removing the large quantity of screws and popping off the cooling shroud, you can see the quite whopping heatsink underneath. Running through the centre is the single, thick heatpipe.

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Taking off the heatsink you get to the core and memory chips underneath. The core itself is completely smothered in generic heatpaste which looks far too thickly applied in places.

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After taking a spy up the skirt of the Ultra, I stuck the cooler back on and moved onto the install.