What you get

The stuff that comes with the card can be enough on occasion to swing the balance of what card an end user picks in the end.  Lots of extras are nice but that adds to the final cost.  Inno3D has always strove for a nice balance of usable extras without going overboard.  Their GeForce 8600 GTS iChill includes a manual, driver CD, a full copy of the game RACE, Molex to 6-pin PCI-E power adapter, composite video cable, HDTV component cable and of course a VGA to DVI adapter plug.

Pass me a sweater

It's hard to look at Inno3D's card without focusing your gaze entirely on the XStriker3 heatpipe cooling assembly.  A robust but not oversized cooler, the XStriker3 cooler looks like it may do well at fitting the bill of providing sufficient cooling at a lower than normal sound level. 

Notice how the cooler intakes air in from the fan and blows it out on both ends.  This breaks away from the traditional rear exhaust we see so often now.  The thin aluminum fins look to offer up a good deal of surface area for cooling.  As we already mentioned, exhaust is out both ends so while you won't be blowing the card's warm air outside of the case, you will be creating some turbulence of the case air.  This will help keep you from having stagnant pockets of warm air over some of the mainboard components.  The downside of this is that you're circulating warm air in doing so.  Shifting gears a bit, don't let the cooler detract your attention away from the gold plated DVI connectors of the connection end and the 6-pin PCI-E power plug on the other.

Let's move back to the cooler.  The 65mm fan is located in the middle of a black and silver colored fan shroud.  Two air slits are on either side of the top section of the shroud as you can see below.  Inno3D calls this their "Air Boost Technology" which claims that the faster moving air within the cooler shroud creates a pressure difference with that of the ambient air inside the case.  This pressure difference causes air to be pulled in through these slits increasing the efficiency of the cooler.  I wish I had some non corrosive colored gas to test this theory so we could visually see if it worked that way with our own eyes.  Unfortunately, we don't but during the testing phase I can close off the slits with tape and see if we have any measurable differences.

Taking things apart we find that the aluminum convection fins are mounted to an aluminum plate with a copper block for the GPU to rest against.  The contact block's effectiveness is enhanced by two heatpipes that whisk heat away from the base to the convection fins quickly.  The base itself is no shaver but didn't have any perceptible scratches or manufacturing abnormalities.  Smooth and clean - no complaints from us.  The second shot below is of the card's GPU and memory laid out bare.  Remember that the XStriker3 Cooler only cools the GPU.  The memory is cooled independently by some smaller BGA RAM sinks.  The air flow from the GPU cooler does indirectly blow across the RAM sinks making them I guess you would call 'quazi-actively' cooled.