Friday, March 2nd 2012
GK104 PCB Pictured in Full
Here is the first true-color picture of the GeForce Kepler 104 (GK104) reference PCB shot in full (well, almost, excluding the uneventful PCIe bus connector). The picture provides a panoramic view of the card's VRM as shown in a drawing posted earlier this day, and reveals the strange double-decker power connector. The card is loaded with a 5-phase NVVDC configuration, as detailed in an older article. It also confirms that the GK104 has a 256-bit wide memory interface, with likely 2 GB standard memory amount. This is also the first picture of the GK104 ASIC, which has square package, and somewhat square die. While the PCB is green in color, it's most likely an engineering sample. The final product (branded GeForce GTX 680 / GTX 670 Ti), could have a black-colored one.
Sources:
ChipHell, Expreview
95 Comments on GK104 PCB Pictured in Full
first comment :)
AMD has been riding the train alone for a while. Finnally some company.
and price competition/ .
But competition is always good!
The audio pass through is a what????... it is 2012 and they are still using 95 specs for it to have sound......Looks more like a fan rpm plug.
Bring it on i say. For the consumer AMD need to drop their price now so if this is better then them nvidia put it just above. Other wise nvidia will price it at £500 and never drop it
What are those 2 DVI ports one on top of the other?
Having only 1 line of ports is perfect because you can buy 1-slot backplates, put some watercooling and free up space for another card.
Having a tower of ports like the GTX590 is not great.
590(with similar secondary fan port):
580:
570:
HOWEVER, my gut still tells me not a fan header :D
Edit: Just noticed that all those cards have the solder points for that header, and also have the same Designation as "J8". It appears thats what the one on the Kepler says too. J8 IS the HDMI audio passthrough on all of them, since the 8000 series. So I stand by my assumption.
Edit: I just went back and looked at the GTX590, the port is definitely used to power the little LED to light up the GeForce logo. So I'm certain that is what is is being used for here as well.
If you want solid proof just read W1z's review of the GTX480:
www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GeForce_GTX_480_Fermi/3.htmlAnd actually, the GT220/240 were the first nVidia cards to not need the passthrough. But they didn't have onboard sound devices, they just passed the signal through the PCI-e bus. At the very least, I can't see nVidia using this method if they weren't including a sound device, because it is far less of a pain in the ass than needing a special cable and SPDIF output.