Taking the Asylum out of the box, we see a starkly contrasting blue orb type cooler mounted to the green PCB of the card.  You can also see the 4.2ns Hynix memory chips on either side of the PCB.  The Asylum comes in 64mb and 128mb versions.  The 64mb model lets things spin up to a rated 500MHz memory clock.  The 128mb version rated at 444MHz.  A quick note on the memory speeds.  With current games the 64mb model theoretically should outperform its big brother; this only until fully compliant DX9 games come out that can take advantage of 128mb of memory on a VGA card.

In addition to the standard 15-pin VGA port you can see the DVI and TV out port.

Upon closer inspection, the cooler appears to be exactly like a Thermaltake Blue ORB.  The cooler is glued onto the core with thermal epoxy.  This amounted to no small amount of misery as you will see.

This is not the first card we have seen that has utilized thermal epoxy to bond the sink to the GPU.  This was however, the first one that had some sort of super tough Popeye type epoxy.  Removing the cooler was itself no big deal.  You can see below that cooler covers the core only.  The ceramic casing wasn't going to benefit from the heatsink.  Which is a shame because heat radiates in all directions and any effort to cool the core's casing should have been taken.  In order to remove the epoxy residue, we did a minimal lap job to the card so as to not give it any advantages in our testing. 

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