A Closer Look

The first piece to come off when disassembling the card is the plastic shroud which houses the fan.


Right below the fan shroud sits this black metal heatsink which covers only the GPU. As we see in temperature testing later, the heatsink is completely adequate and works fine without expensive copper base or heatpipes.


I find it quite surprising that Gainward put two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors on their card. Such an output configuration would be good for 225 W which is well over the 146 W that we measured in Furmark.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ1H24AFR-T0C. They are specified to run at 1000 MHz (4000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


Gainward is using a cost effect NCP5395 voltage controller on their card. While it does not offer software control via I2C, some basic control is possible using the VID inputs.


NVIDIA's GF104 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 1.95 billion transistors. Please note that the silvery metal surface you see is the heatspreader of the GPU. The actual GPU die is sitting under the heatspreader, and is roughly 332 mm² in size.