Planet Riva heeft een review gepost van de nieuwe GA-660 Plus TNT2 kaart van Gigabyte. Deze .22 micron TNT2 draait standaard op 183/183MHz, maar echt veel hoger kan ie niet, hooguit 190MHz. Begin oktober komt deze kaart op de markt.
The GA-660 Plus is a nice looking card. It is laid out on cool looking blue PCB. There are four 6ns SDRAM modules, each 8MB. There is an active cooling fan and heat-sink on the top side of the card, which is a sign that this is no "plain vanilla' offering.The capacitors are not "oil drum sized" clunkers, the card has a neat and clean layout. The TNT2 chip hidden beneath the fan is .22 micron fab, which is more than likely the last design change for the TNT2 chip.
Flipping the card over reveals a profile which is as smooth as a baby's butt, plus a rear heat-sink. That's right RIVA fanatics, the GA-660 Plus comes with a bright blue, over-sized heat-sink on the back of the board! And it's not just for looks either, it really does a great job of pulling additional heat from the bottom of the TNT2 chip.
I went out to my local computer parts store and spent three dollars on a 466 CPU fan which I attached to the rear heat-sink. Attaching a rear fan on this card is a good idea, because this heat-sink does generate a lot of heat. Of course we all know that a hot heat-sink is a good thing, because it is sign that the heat-sink is pulling heat off the video chip itself.
Attaching a fan on this heat-sink insures that you will have a much cooler card than most of the other Ultra TNT2 cards which come with only one heat-sink and fan. The fact that it uses .22 micron fab for the chip, as opposed to .25 micron fab should also serve to keep it a little cooler than some of the .25 micron TNT2 Ultra versions which are on the market. All of the bench tests were performed without the additional fan attached, so as to give a true to life product review.
The GA-660 Plus is put together well, it implements the spring tension method of attaching the main heat-sink, which is much better than the "glob of glue" method.
