Palit GeForce GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP 1792MB Graphics Card: Customized Cooling A La Palit
littlelion | 03 September, 2009 16:36
NVIDIA’s attempt to make its midrange portfolio and eagerness to trim down the popularity of AMD’s ATI Radeon 4800 series gave rise to the birth of two other versions of the GeForce GTX 260 GPU. More or less a year ago, the GPU giant came with the GTX 260 216SP, which differs from the original GTX 260 by means of stream processor count. The former has 192 whereas the latter has 216, just as what its moniker openly suggests. Three months later, another GTX 260 216SP had surfaced, still with 216 stream processors, but based on the 55nm fabrication process. Its predecessor is a 65nm chip.
With these offerings joining the fray, NVIDIA has been able to put the Radeon 4800 series in check in some way. The turn of events became a bit more favorable for the Green Team, when its partners brought into being incarnations with customized coolers. Palit arrived on the scene on time with the GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP.
The card’s customized cooler, at first sight, is remarkably similar to the one found on the Palit Revolution 700. It features a pair of enormous fans, which blows cool air over an elaborate heatsink. To find out how elaborate it is, we decided to look at it piece by piece.
All in all, it took us quite a while to disassemble the GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP. It is as if Palit was showing how serious are they when it comes to customized cooling solutions. The entire cooling assembly on the card is secured by twenty-two (22) Phillips screws!
Checking the PWM fans, we found out that they are manufactured by Power Logic and designated with model name PLA08015B12HH, the same one installed on the Revolution 700 card. Each 9-blade fan is rated at 33.95 C.F.M. at 3500RPM with a noise rating of 35.7dBA making use of 4.2 watts of electricity
The heatsink assembly is divided into three parts. The most prominent is the one crowning the GPU, composed of a copper plate, three heatpipes, and multiple fins.
Lying beneath the GPU heatsink is the more expansive heatsink cooling the memory chips.
The smallest heatsink cools other integrated components that are surrounded by solid capacitors and ferrite chokes.
Without the customized cooler, this is how the front and rear of the GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP looked.
Surrounding the GPU is a set of fourteen (14) GDDR3 memory chips produced by Qimonda and has the model name HYB48H1G321AF-10. On the PCB layout, we found a pair of empty patterns in which two additional memory chips can be possibly soldered.
Unquestionably, the GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP eats up two motherboard slots. Aside from the staple DVI and VGA connectors, this card is also equipped with an HDMI output. Another version of the GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP, which our colleagues in Singapore reviewed recently, has two dual-link DVI outputs and 7-pin mini-DIN.
A twin of SLI connectors means 3-way SLI is possible. With NVIDIA's flexible configurations, you can hook up an older card to offload PhysX processing if you opted to.
The power connectors of the GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP graphics card.
The pretty standard set of accessories of the card.
At the time of writing, we were actually in the process of putting the Palit GTX 260 Sonic 216 SP to our battery of graphics benchmarks. We know that you are already excited of knowing how the card fared. However, hold your horses for the moment. Stay tuned for our comprehensive take on this graphics card in the coming issues of HWM Philippines!
comments
Memory
commentator | 04/09/2009, 16:23
memory
sality | 04/09/2009, 23:08
Each memory chip has 128MB. 128MB x 14 = 1792MB
128MB x 16 = 2048MB
memory
sality | 04/09/2009, 23:09
Each memory chip has 128MB. 128MB x 14 = 1792MB
128MB x 16 = 2048MB
gt 300
randalf | 17/10/2009, 10:21
I'll wait for the GT 300 instead. The GT 200 series seems to be one of the underwhelming graphics card series of nvidia.
review
Digi | 17/02/2010, 00:37
f**king shitty card... doesnt fit on an ASUS Rampage 2 Gene mbd...cudnt setup SLI...too wide to fit 2 cards on adjacent slots.... crap for dos of u goin for SLI... inadequate ventilation... make sure u hv at least 600W high efficiency PSU to feed it!
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If two additional memory chips are soldered on the board, the card's memory size would be around 2GB.