A Closer Look

The massive heatsink uses five DirectTouch heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU surface. Heat is then transported through the heatpipes to the fins sitting right below the two fans.


The metal backplate comes off last because its screws are screwed in from the front side which makes them inaccessible until the GPU cooler is removed. I find this a bit impractical since you need to remove the cooler every time you want to measure voltage or do some modding on the PCB.


The card requires two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors, which seems justified on a card with overclockers and voltmodders in mind.


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).


ASUS rebranded the voltage regulator chip to their own "Super Hybrid Engine" technology, which involved scraping the paint off and putting the new markings there. Under the hood the chip seems to look identical to a UPI uP6225 which is used on some GTX 480 cards, for example.


NVIDIA's GeForce 110 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 3.0 billion transistors which is 200 million less than the GF100. Please note that the silvery metal surface you see is the heatspreader of the GPU. According to NVIDIA, the die size of the GF110 graphics processor is 520 mm².