G80's small chip is for NV I/0

OUR FRIENDS from China published very detailed pictures of the Geforce 8800 GTX and GTS cards.

Many of you noticed the smaller chip that accompanies G80 on the GTX board. You can clearly see it on the site.

We popped the question as we wanted to know what it is doing. It turns out that the small chip on the Geforce 8800 cards is an Nvidia NVIO chip. It provides dual 400MHz RAMDAC and Dual - Dual Link DVI output, TV Out and HDCP. Our informative friends call the chip External Video I/O Chip or simply External RAMDAC. We don't have any idea why Nvidia needed that, as RAMDAC has been normally part of the chip for generations.

The detailed review in, Chinese, is here but you can always translate it but you can see some cool DX10 rendering pictures and detailed specs here. µ