Video Card

Here we have the front and back side of the Diamond Viper X800GTO. It has the small HSF with a picture of ATI's Ruby and the Diamond emblem. You can also see the card runs from the motherboard power with no Molex to plug into. On the back side Diamond added RAM heat sinks which are attached on very solid. I tried to take one off and it wasn't coming off unless I wanted a RAM chip with it. During OCing they got fairly warm which meant they were making good contact with the RAM chips and dissipating heat. The HSF performed well at stock speeds but was fighting a losing battle when it came to overclocking. We'll discuss that more in the overclocking section.



As display connectors you get an analog VGA output and a digital DVI output. The round connector in the middle is for TV-out to watch movies on your TV, for example.



After removing the HSF we can see it was a little sloppy but was making good contact with the core. We can see the core cleaned up and make the point here that Diamond opted to go with the R480 core and not the R423.