Inno3D's quest for the first non-reference GeForce GTX 470 has taken a turn with the company now planning to design its own cooling assembly. First
surfaced in late March, Inno3D's non-reference GTX 470 wasn't much more than a reference-design card with green colored PCB instead of black. It also retained the reference cooling assembly, albeit slightly toned down with four copper heat-pipes instead of five.
The new cooling assembly, now in the form of CAD drawings, makes use of an elaborate aluminum fin arrays to which heat from the GPU is fed by heat-pipes. These are cooled by three 80~90 mm fans. While cooling the GPU, the three also blow air onto heatsinks over the memory and VRM areas. Inno3D plans to brand its new card the Inno3D iChill GTX 470 Hawk 1280 MB. The DirectX 11 generation GeForce GTX 470 GPU packs 448 CUDA cores, and addresses 1280 MB (1.25 GB) of memory across a 320-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. The company did not share when it plans to get these out.
In related news, Inno3D released pictures from its warehouse where it just received crate-loads of GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards from NVIDIA. This time around you can see the actual cards in the boxes. Ironically, Inno3D
released pictures of its branded boxes of GTX 400 cards back in March, without showing pictures of actual cards. It had then claimed to be ready to ship those cards.
From here on, Inno3D, like every other authorized board partner, will place company stickers on those virgin cards, pack them in their shiny Inno3D branded boxes (pictured earlier), and off they go to wherever market demand takes them.
