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Chaintech GeForce AA6800 Turbo The Card If you only took a quick glance, you would think the Chaintech AA6800 Turbo is the same as most other 6800 cards on the market with the exception of the graphic on the outer cover.
S-Video, DVI output and a 15 pin VGA output on one side with the expected four-pin Molex plug on the other.
As you look longer and closer, the differences separating the Chaintech from the rest of the pack begin to stand out. These differences center around the core and the memory clock speed being turned up 10% to give us 358MHz on the GPU and 770MHz with the memory. Let's look at how Chaintech addresses the added speed with its cooler on the AA6800 Turbo. In the picture below notice how one side has aluminum cooling fins while another side has aluminum cooling rods. This is an attempt to keep the memory chips as equally cool as possible regardless of the chip placement.
With the outer cover removed, we see that the GPU heatsink is copper and is not physically attached to the memory cooling plate. The air is channeled from the front to the rear of the card as you would expect. The orientation of the copper GPU sink fins however, allows air to move quicker over them and then through the memory cooling fins to the rear. The purpose of having more efficient cooling fins on the rear mounted memory is because your card's memory clock will only be as fast as your slowest chip. This is in part determined by heat. By increasing the cooling potential to the rear memory chips you add stability and a higher possible memory clock to the card. Thermal pads were found as the interface material between the memory and the cooling plates and seemed adequate.
As much as we have been talking about the memory, it only seems natural we take a closer look at the memory chips. They are 2.2ns (450MHz) Hynix chips that seem to be the bread and butter of many DDR memory based cards.
Here are some close ups of the GPU cooler. A nice high density thin fin design maximizes surface area and with it, cooling efficiency. The base was smooth to the touch but didn't have the mirrored finish we see in many other places. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Chaintech used silver thermal paste as an interface material between the GPU and its cooler.
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