A Closer Look

In order to disassemble the card you need to remove this metal plate which is glued on top of the Zalman logo and the four screws.


Zalman's VNF100 is made up of two main components. A small base which soaks up the heat and moves it to the heatsink module on the back using three heatpipes. Even though the base is rather small and doesn't have any copper components it does an excellent job, the card is running comfortable temperatures at all times.


The card has no dedicated power connectors, all operating power is sucked from the PCI-Express bus.


The DDR2 (!) memory chips are made by Qimonda and carry the model number HYB18T512161CF-20. With a latency of 2.0 ns, they are specified to run at 500 MHz.


This is AMD's RV730 GPU. It is made in a 55 nm process with 512 million transistors. On the card the GPU is protected by a small plastic shim (not pictured) to avoid crushing the GPU core.