A Closer Look

ZOTAC's cooler uses a copper baseplate with several heatpipes to keep the card cool. The baseplate also cools secondary components like voltage regulation circuitry and memory chips.


The card requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors, which is just enough to handle the card with NVIDIA power limit on and no additional overclocking. However, we did take the card well beyond its specs and had no problems with power delivery.


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).


As voltage controller an OnSemi NCP5388 is used. It is a cost effective alternative to controllers from Volterra or CHiL, but does not support voltage control via I2C. It is however possible to control voltages using a VID based method exported by NVIDIA's driver. The current BIOS of the card is limited to a maximum voltage of 1.150 V, the default is 1.142 V, so unless you do some manual BIOS editing the voltage range will be quite limited.


NVIDIA's GeForce 114 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses the same architecture as NVIDIA's GF 104 but with improvements on the transistor level to reduce power consumption.