I must go down to AMD's Twin City again

THE SECOND TECHTOUR article of the day now has pictures. There were three things that I found picture-worthy at the Minneapolis AMD TechTour where I was a few nights ago, two from Gigabyte, and one from VIA.

The first one from Gigabyte is a card that looks a lot like the GV-N68128DH, but I spaced writing the name down. It is a flavor of GeForce 6800, that much I am sure, and it also has no fans. As you can see below, it is a completely silent, and very golden card. If you look closely though, you can see the part that caught my attention, the big heatsink on the back as well as the one on the front. I found this interesting because it allows for more clearance and does not eat a PCI slot with a slab of aluminum.

Next up is a feature that is both cool and somewhat disturbing. Gigabyte has a heatpipe, heatsink and fan on their power converters. It is cool because it looks good and potentially greatly enhances stability. It is disturbing because it is needed. Either way, it looks really neat, here is a side view.

Last up is VIA, and their dually PCIe graphics boards. This one is a prototype board, but it was up, running and stable. The nice thing about it is that you can either run in SLI mode with a single monitor and monster frame rates, or go for multi-monitors. In this case, they went the multiple monitor route and had three screens going. I want that for my house, two monitors are very restrictive, and I am a geek. Either way, if you look closely, you can see that the cards are very different, so even with pre-release silicon, it is quite tolerant. That is a good thing for all of us.µ