First Impressions:
I wasn’t too surprised about the size of the box the FX-71 came in, having seen it at the Chaintech Reloaded event held in May. However, I thought it would have been filled with nothing but air, and extra packing material. I was dead wrong. The card was sitting at the top in an anti static casing, but underneath is held all the toys that came with the card.
To quote a friend: “This is a sexy videocard”. Chaintech put a lot of time and effort into making this videocard look esthetically pleasing. I was told by Cathy Liu from Chaintech USAthat Chaintech wanted to make this videocard not only look good on screen, but look good in your PC. They bundled the Q Ball and the Anti-Static brush with the card so you can clean your monitor and clear the dust out of your AGP slot for best performance and best image quality. It’s nice to see a company that offers extra accessories with the consumer in mind.
The card is covered by a clear plastic casing with a gold underlay. The cover extends over the whole card, only allowing a small opening for the Gas-Turbine cooling fan. On the underside of the card, is a large heatspreader.
For those wondering like I did, what happens if dust gets into the card, how do I clean it? Well the casing comes off very easily by removing two screws on the backside of the card.
Now that we have the casing off, let’s see what we get. Well this card has a lot of bling bling on it. All the ramsinks and heatsinks are gold colored, even underneath the cover, where most people wouldn’t even think of looking. There are enough fins on each sink to keep your RAM and core at a decent temperature, keeping your videocard nice and cool while you play.
The Gas-Turbine fan looks very impressive right next to the core. After removing the casing, it is very easy to clean, just blow some compressed air over it and there you go: all clean.
Plugging in the card proved fairly easy. Like most nVidia GeForceFX cards, we expect them to block access to PCI slot one, and this card is no different, but in this day an age of integrated sound offering excellent sound quality, integrated LAN and etc, we can afford to lose one PCI slot. That and who ever uses that first PCI slot anyways. Flipping on the power switch, this puppy started glowing like there was no tomorrow. The LEDs on this card are small yet bright enough to illuminate the whole case and with only two of them on the card.
