We may as well kick things off with a simple fact - The G80 core which powers the GeForce 8800 is huge. Built on TSMC's 90 nanometre process, G80 consists of a whopping 681 million transistors, substantially more than even Intel's recently released Core 2 Quad CPUs. Of course, this kind of transistor count on what is now a pretty mature manufacturing process means a big (and thus expensive) die underneath the heatspreader which houses the core and helps to output heat from the GPU to its hefty cooling system.

The sheer size and complexity of G80 probably goes a long way to explaining the inclusion of a separate daughter die on GeForce 8800 boards, dubbed NVIO. As the name might suggest, this die handles input and output for the graphics board, which covers everything from inter-GPU communication via the normal SLI connectors used by NVIDIA to any and all display output and input from the board. Naturally this includes both TV out and video-in, as well as the two HDCP capable dual-link DVI connectors found as standard on all GeForce 8800 boards.