BFG has announced two new cards in its 8600 series, the BFG NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS OC 256MB and GeForce 8600 GTS OC2 256MB ThermoIntelligence PCIe.
Both of these cards come with a redesigned cooling that BFG calls ThermoIntelligence. Apparently the redesign is all about moving the fan to the opposite end of heatsink, as BFG explains, to eliminate a dead air zone and increase the surface area over the GPU so it gets improved heat dissipation. Nothing fancy if you ask me, but it does the job that it should do, keep the GPU cooler.
According to BFG's PR, the ThermoIntelligence fansink lowers the GPU temperature by an average of 5C, when compared to the Nvidia reference cooler. In SLI, the secondary card has 6C lower temperature and the primary gets 11C cooler. The great thing here is that it is not some huge fancy cooler, so it is not a dual-slot solution. And the bottom line is that it does the job.
Lets take a look at the cards with this new cooler. The first one is called BFG NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS OC 256MB ThermoIntelligence PCIe. This cards GPU is clocked at 710MHz, thats 35MHz higher than the reference cards. As for the memory, it stayed at reference spec, 256MB of GDDR3 clocked at 2,000MHz.
The second card is a different story, since its GPU ended up at 720MHz, 45MHz higher than the reference clock. The cards official name is BFG NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS OC2 256MB PCIe with ThermoIntelligence. The Shader clocks for the first card aren't disclosed, so we assume that they are at reference speed.
The shader clocks for the second card are 1,566MHz, thats much higher than the 1,450MHz of the reference card, 116MHz to be exact. The memory on the card went even higher, from the reference 2,000MHz to a stunning 2,220MHz. As you can see from the name of the card, it has 256MB of GDDR3 memory.