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The Technology
The 3D1 is built with 256MB DDR3 memory and claims to supports 256-bit memory bandwidth as well. Now that bandwidth is a little tricky as it's actually (2x)128-bit at work here, your standard 6600GT times two. Same goes for the amount of memory, it's 128 MB per graphics core and you cannot look at the card as a 256 MB model. It's quite shady but I think textures and graphics data are in fact cloned in both frame buffer in a 1:1 way so you're basically looking at 128 Mb effective, which on it's term will effect things like high-resolution Anisotropic filtering and AA modes.

That 256MB of DDR3 memory on the card is rated at 1.6ns, which means it has a potential 625MHz (1250MHz DDR) memory frequency. The card has a core clock of 500MHz and a memory clock of 590MHz (1180MHz DDR).

Other then these specifications there really is nothing special about the graphics core's compared to our other 6600GT reviews. The graphics cores used are identical to the ones you find on your GeForce 6600 GT.

I already mentioned this in the introduction a bit. Exciting as the idea might be, when you look at the card you'll notice that there is no SLI connector on top of the card. You can forget about placing a second 3D1 card in there. The card utilizes all 16 PCI-Express lanes. Also, I noticed some of you guys posting question like, is this going to be available as AGP solution? Forget about it, it's simply not possible.

When we take a first look at the card, well  you can't help falling in love at the least a little bit, as it's quite something that was achieved here. You will get a little excited and very anxious to test it. Or as one of my friends said when he walked into our office and saw the card: "now that's what I call a videocard!"

Of course a dual-gpu solution comes with double cooling solution. Now cooling is tricky these days, there's always a fine balance between effective cooling versus noise. I was quite suprised when I activated the rig and noticed that sound levels coming from the cooling were just normal. One fan is sucking in air while the other blows it away.

*coughing Gollum* My precious...