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.


ASUS has put the most complex voltage regulator cooling circuitry on their card that I have seen on any GTX 460 so far. A heatsink on the front cools some components and the voltage regulator IC on the back (the single pink pad) is also cooled.


The GTX 460 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).


Looks like ASUS is using their EPU voltage controller on graphics cards, too - it has been seen first one some of their motherboards. EPU stands for "Energy Processing Unit" and offers "better power effiency and overclocking, it can balance each phase better".


NVIDIA's new GF104 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 1.95 billion transistors. Please note that the silvery metal surface you see is the heatspreader of the GPU. The actual GPU die is sitting under the heatspreader, and is roughly 332 mm² in size.