The first thing I thought upon gazing upon the EVGA 7600GS for the first time was gee where’s the cooling fan? NVIDIA decided the 7600GS could be cooled effectively by a passive heat sink. EVGA followed the NVIDIA reference design to the T. The heat sink covers the graphics chip, the memory chips and the vast majority of the front of the PCB.

The 7600GS is a Native PCI Express x16 card. Early NVIDIA chipsets required a HSI (High Speed Interconnect) bridge chip to operate on the PCI Express bus. The card itself is fairly small compared to modern high-end video cards. One consequence of moving from the 130 nanometer 6800 to the 90 nanometer 7600GS was the lack of the need for an external power connector.

EVGA chose to outfit the 7600GS with a D-Sub and a DVI-I connector on the side bracket for the Input/Output area. The user can have a LCD, a CRT, a CRT+LCD, two CRTs with the included DVI-I to D-Sub adapter or use the S-Video Out to play computer games on their television. NVIDIA’s drivers contain a utility called nView that controls the monitor functions.