Ripping it apart
Getting inside the XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 is definitely a lot more difficult than your standard graphics card. Since the card design is completely enclosed up you have to remove the entire shell before you can even start to access the graphics boards inside.
This is the front of the graphics card after removing the shell. Notice that it looks just like we would expect to see the back of any other graphics card look.
Flipping it over we see the exact same layout on the back of the card.
All of the cooling actually sits between the two G92 graphics boards in the form of a single large heat sink and fan combination. Here you can see the top of the graphics card and some of the air vents along it.
At the bottom of the card you can see what looks to be an SLI cable running between the two different PCB boards.
After carefully removing the top PCB and flipping it over onto its back we can clearly see what appears to be basically a normal graphics board. The GPU sits in the center up of the memory modules as we would normally see; the one major difference is obviously the large hole that sits on the back of the card for airflow.
Zooming in on the ribbon cables that attach the two graphics boards we can clearly see what is basically an SLI connection between the two cards.
Just as with AMD’s board, the NVIDIA 9800 GX2 does require a bridge chip in order to function correctly that is responsible for taking the single PCIe connection coming into the card splitting it into signals for both of the on-board GPUs and the merging the data back.
Here is the heat sink and fan combination sitting by itself. It is definitely the majority of the weight and has to be heavy duty in order to cool both G92 cores all by itself.
This picture shows both of the G92 boards sitting side by side. Obviously only one has the bridge chip necessary for their communications with the main system bus but both feature of the same graphics core and memory systems. Interestingly the card that has the 8-pin power connection does not have the bridge chip connected to it.
Finally, here is a shot of the G92 core that is used on the GeForce 9800 GX2.
