The Fatal1ty 8600GT

The board itself features a black PCB, which is probably the best looking colour a manufacturer can use. It's sleek and professional but looks cool at the same time. The days of green circuit boards are long gone; we hope. Something else which makes the card look good are the solid capacitors. Although these are mainly used for their longer operation life, they are also chunkier and just look that bit better.

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Cooler

The first 8600GT we reviewed back in April was a passively cooled one from MSI. This Fatal1ty edition uses a similar design of a small front heatsink linked by heatpipes to a large, rear-mounted one.

The front part has a black heatsink with a small black shroud designed to direct the cases airflow across the fins of the sink; and to show off the Fatal1ty logo of course. As you can see the heatsink covers both the core itself and the PWM area.

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Coming out from the large sink is a pair of heatpipes which follow from the top though a metallic mounting platform and end up in the centre of a whopping rear heatsink.

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Although the many finned aluminium block looks quite good itself, one eye sore on it is the piece of plastic covered in a nasty yellowish glue that seems like cost cutting in the extreme. Would it have cost that much more to put a small piece of black plastic there? At least that would have fitted with the colouring of the rest of the card.

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The whole cooler setup is held on by just two small screws. These are low profile to avoid clearance issues but it will be interesting to see if any problems arise from the rear mounted heatsink; even if it is at the top of the card.

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Rear

The back end of the card has the usual twin DVI slots but on this card, but instead of the normal white, they are the XFX green.

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Also at the rear of the card - but mounted on a different side - is a single SLI bridge connector. This allows for more than one GPU to connected for up to twice the performance of a single card.

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On more high end cards you often see more than one bridge connector to give future tri or even quad SLI support.