A Closer Look

The first step in disassembly is removing the Twin Frozr II cooler, which uses five heatpipes to transport the GPU's heat away from the baseplate to a large number of fins which are cooled by two fans. Once the main heatsink is removed, there is still a metal plate left on the card which cools the memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry.


MSI's heat spreader is made from metal and covers all secondary heat sources.


The last piece that remains on the card is the black stabilizer near the top edge. It is made from metal and serves to protect the card against any bending or warping from the weight of the heatsink (which is not that heavy in my opinion).


The GTX 465 requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC05. They are specified to run at 1000 MHz (4000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


OnSemi's NCP5388 is a reasonable priced voltage regulator, unfortunately it does not have I2C voltage control. NVIDIA however exposes an API for voltage changes via VID in their NVAPI, which is used in MSI Afterburner for voltage control.


NVIDIA's GeForce 100 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 3.2 billion transistors which makes it the most complex GPU built to-date. Please note that the silvery metal surface you see is the heatspreader of the GPU which measures 42.3 x 42.3 mm. The actual GPU die is sitting under the heatspreader, its dimensions are not known. NVIDIA did not communicate a die size measurement to the press.