The Vvikoo 8600GT Turbo

I hate to start the "look at the card" section with a negative point, but this one from Vvikoo has to be one of the blandest, ugliest cards I have ever seen. It has a green PCB - which is a bad start - a very sparse circuit board and rounded edge heatsinks which gives the whole thing an OEM look. I would expect to find this in a pre-built machine in the "gamer" section at PC World, not in a box with the words "Turbo" on it.

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The rear is much the same with some low profile screws to avoid mounting issues.

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Cooler

The cooler isn't a lot better. As far as I know Vvikoo will be using Zalman coolers on most of their cards in the future, but for now it's an amalgamation of a Zalman heatsink and Vvikoo fan. The latter looks reasonable, but I would have expected more in terms of heatsink style from Zalman.

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It's design is that of a 3/4 petal cooler which is made up of a Vvikoo fan surrounded by some chunky aluminium fins. There are no heatpipes to be found like you see on high end coolers.

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The RAM chips are covered by an aluminium heatsink which looks a bit "economy". It could be the finish, but it just doesn't look as professional as some RAM sinks do.

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The fan is powered by a two pin cable which connects to a socket at the bottom of the board. Interestingly there is another at the top but plugging it in there causes the fan to stop spinning.

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Rear

At the back of the card you have the typical twin DVI ports, but these are coloured in red instead of the usual white. You also have the SVideo socket.

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Near the back but on a different edge, you have the single SLI bridge connector. This allows for two graphics cards to run in tandem for increased performance. The higher end cards often come with two SLI bridge connectors which allows for future compatibility with tri and quad SLI setups.

Here you can also see the secondary, useless, 2pin power connector.

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