Point of View has launched its latest graphics card, the 7600 GS, with models featuring 256MiB and a buffer-tastic 512MiB of RAM.
With Pure Video, dual-link DVI output and the reasonably nippy 7600 GS GPU sat on the card, Point of View reckon it's up to the task of gaming, along with video playback on a nice fat screen. Indeed, that seems true, but it wasn't that which had us intrigued about the card.
The cooler for the card, which you'll see in just a moment, features a heatpipe. As you probably know, heatpipes are used to rapidly conduct heat away from a source, along the heatpipe, to a location where the heat can be better dissipated. They're often used to shift heat from a CPU or GPU to a secondary heatsink. However, in this case, we're a bit baffled...
This heatpipe seems to move heat from appromately 2cm away from the GPU die, and transfer it to a location... 2cm at the other side of the GPU die, give or take a few millimetres. It's a PCIe card too, so there's no bridge chip under the lower part of the pipe. There's no mention of the heatpipe in the press release. In that case then, given that we can't see how it helps cooling, our guess it's for use as a carry handle.
If anyone has a better idea, answers on a postcard. That aside, 512MiB on a 7600 GS sounds nice, providing the super-duper heatpipe doesn't add too much to the price.
