A Closer Look

Gigabyte's cooler design is intricate. It uses six heatipes to transport heat away from the copper baseplate quickly. You can also see additional thermal pads that keep memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry cool. They could maybe use a bit less thermal paste next time.


The card requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power cable for operation. This power configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw.

I noticed that it's difficult to install the power plugs and much more difficult to remove them, which is only possible with lots of force, more than most users would be comfortable applying. The reason is that the heatsink fins don't leave enough space for the little latching tab on the power plug. ASUS flipped their power connectors for exactly that reason on some designs. After reporting to Gigabyte, they confirmed the issue and also clarified that it is fixed and will not appear on retail boards.


NVIDIA uses the same OnSemi NCP4206 voltage controller on the GTX 780 than on the Titan. It is a cost-effective solution that does not provide any I2C, so advanced monitoring is not possible. Please note how it sits on its own PCB, so we could see different voltage controllers in the future. The GTX 680 uses a similar approach, but the variety of voltage controllers was relatively low.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4G20325FD-FC03. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GK110 graphics processor was first introduced as a Tesla-only product for powering demanding GPU compute applications. NVIDIA has now also released it as a GeForce GPU. It uses 7.1 billion transistors on a die size that we measured to be 561 mm². The GPU is produced on a 28 nanometer process at TSMC, Taiwan.