A Closer Look

ZOTAC's cooler looks quite simple. There are no fancy heatpipes or a copper baseplate. In our testing the cards stayed at low temperatures and the cooler was extremely quiet though.
ZOTAC does not use any form of heatsink on their voltage regulation circuitry, but they are using two seperate FETs per PWM phase which spreads the heat over a bigger area.


All GeForce GTS 450 variants require just a single PCI-Express power connector.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


OnSemi's NCP5395 is a simple, cost-effective voltage regulator that we have seen on other graphics card designs before. It does not offer I2C voltage control, but a VID based control is available through API in NVIDIA's driver.


NVIDIA's new GF106 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan and is based on NVIDIA's Fermi architecture just like the more powerful GF100 on the GTX 480, for example. It uses approximately 1.17 billion transistors. Unlike its other Fermi brothers, there is no heatspreader present. The die area is roughly 228 mm² in size.