The largest portion of the card's surface area is occupied by the large heatsink bearing the manufacturer's name. It is a rather simple yet effective heatsink that will keep the temperature at normal levels. The card weighs more or less the same as most of the graphics cards on the market, maybe a bit heavier due to the size of the GPU cooler. The card requires a dual Molex power feed from your power supply.

Underneath the cooler and the metal plate, there is a series of 8 32MB GDD3 memory modules, resulting in 256MB capacity.

The picture below shows the "heart" of the card, the nVidia chipset. It is manufactured using the 0.13 Micron process and offers 16 Pixel Pipelines. Due to the 0.13 Micron thickness, it really heats up under heavy load, but the GPU cooler does a great job keeping the GPU temperatures at considerably low levels.

The 6800 Ultra is a heavy duty graphics card, so the cooler required must also be heavy duty and hence the metal fins at the side of the GPU cooler, enhancing cooling performance. Note also that the rotation of the GPU fan varies according to the load the card is put under.

A close look at the metal fins...

Now let's move to the next page where we cover in detail our graphics card's testbed.