A Closer Look

The ASUS DirectCU thermal solution uses a Direct Touch concept in which three copper heatpipes make direct contact with the GPU surface. Heat is then moved to a large number of fins which are cooled in the airflow of the fan.


The voltage regulation circuitry is also cooled by a simple heatsink. On the other side of the card a second heatsink is located which cools the voltage controller IC.


All GeForce GTS 450 variants require just a single PCI-Express power connector.


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).


uPI's uP6206 is a simple, cost-effective voltage regulator that we have seen on other graphics card designs before. It does not offer I2C voltage control, but a VID based control is available through API in NVIDIA's driver.


NVIDIA's new GF106 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan and is based on NVIDIA's Fermi architecture just like the more powerful GF100 on the GTX 480, for example. It uses approximately 1.17 billion transistors. Unlike its other Fermi brothers, there is no heatspreader present. The die area is roughly 228 mm² in size.