Gigabyte GV-RX16T256V-RH
Watch out! Here come Gigabyte with its stunningly named card. Although, to be fair, while the names are a little unsightly, Gigabyte has most of the information about the spec. of the product encoded into them.
We have another passively cooled card here, but where ASUS' solution was somewhat subtle, Gigabyte have gone for the all out option of putting heatsinks left, right and centre. The PCB carries Gigabyte's usual blue colouring and it refers to the beefed-up cooling as Silent-Pipe II.
Atop the GPU is a heatpiped hunk of copper, which itself has fins to help remove some extra heat. There's then a secondary heatsink which attaches to a second slot at the back of the card - yes, this card will take up two slots in your machine. Without any fans, we wonder just how much air is going to flow over that second heatsink and out of the case.
Around the back there's yet another heatsink; Gigabyte is taking no cooling chances here, at the expense of space and weight.
Again we've got dual-DVI and video-out, along with the vent for Gigabyte's cooler. Interestingly, Gigabyte reckons that the maximum resolution for both DVI ports is the single-link's 1920x1200.
Bundled is the game Xpand Rally, along with PowerDVD 6 (2-channel) and PowerDirector 3 DE. There are also drivers and the V-Tuner2 utility for overclocking.
The single breakout box contains all the connections required for hooking up to an HDTV or other video output. It's nice to see a single neat breakout box, rather than a spider web of cabling.
