A Closer Look

The cooler in use is an Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro that is available retail for around $40. Arctic's heatsink features a central copper baseplate with four heatpipes. However, the base area was not designed for a heatspreader the size of the GF 104 GPU as the last picture above shows. But don't let the looks fool you, the actual GPU silicon die under the heatspreader is fully covered, so there won't be any issues with cooling.


Once the main cooling assembly is removed, you are left with a small metal heatsink that cools the VRM circuitry of the card. It is good to see a VRM heatsink present, some other manufacturers save a few cents here.


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).


While the NVIDIA reference designs use an NCP5388 voltage controller from OnSemi, Axle has chosen a Richtek 8841 for their card. Like NCP5388 it does not have I2C voltage control, but NVIDIA's drivers expose a VID based control scheme for it.


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.