A Closer Look

NVIDIA's cooler is a relatively basic solution, but it does its job fine. We've seen other board partners use more elaborate coolers which provide better temperatures and noise levels. Please note that the cooler only has a baseplate for the GPU, it provides no cooling for memory or voltage regulation circuitry.


Once the main heatsink is removed you can see that the voltage regulation circuitry has its own dedicated heatsink which ensures those components stay cool.


The card requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors. This configuration is good for up to 225 W of power draw.


NVIDIA uses an OnSemi NCP5392 voltage controller, which is a simple but cost effective solution. It does not offer I2C voltage control or any monitoring features. We have seen this controller on some GTX 470 cards before.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's new GK104 graphics processor introduces the company's brand-new Kepler architecture. It is NVIDIA's first chip to be produced on a 28 nanometer process, at TSMC Taiwan. The transistor count is 3.54 billion.