The Card Itself

Opening up the box and removing the very weighty card from its extremely thick anti-static bag we get our first look at this (To me at least) enormous card:

As you can see almost the entire card is covered by an exhaust style cooler. Underneath the printed image of the Sapphire girly is an copper finned heatsink with copper cores over the GPU itself and some smaller copper sections over each ram module.

As you can see from the above picture the air is drawn in through the "Front" of the cooler and drawn over the interior copper fins before being exhausted out of the "Back" of the card and out of the case. The fan itself is not a typical propeller fan but is instead a centrifugal fan which can help cut down noise and most importantly save a lot of space, making it possible for the exhaust cooler setup to be used.

The cooler is mounted to the card using a standard starfish style mounting plate. There are no extra heatsinks on the back of the card.

Installing the card was a bit difficult in the particular case I used as the 6 pin power cable needed to be bent around the hard drive power cables in order to accommodate both in but with a little bit of pressure it was not the biggest headache in the world.

With the card installed it was onto the testing.