A Closer Look

A metal plate on the back protects the card from accidental damage. It also adds a nice touch to the card giving it a more industrial design. Please note the white spacers which ensure that the backplate does not touch the components on the back. This also means that the plate does not serve any cooling function.


The next piece to come off is the plastic fan shroud that also houses the two fans.


Finally the large heatsink assembly comes off. It uses four heatpipes to transport heat away from the GPU surface where it can be dumped in the large fin arrays that sit in the fans' airflow.


Colorful has added easy to reach voltage measure points that cover all the voltages present on the card, even though the ones in focus of overclockers will only be GPU voltage and maybe memory voltage.


Colorful has installed those two "extenders" to the power connectors because the cooler design might make installation a bit difficult. This approach actually makes it surprisingly easy to connect the power cables from the PSU, but it does look a bit messy compared to a direct connection. It would have been nice if the cables were sleeved.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ1H24AFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


CHiL CHL8266 is the same voltage regulator used on the GeForce GTX 480. It offers extensive voltage control and monitoring features via I2C. Unfortunately Colorful does not bundle any overclocking utility with their card, so that end-users have to use software like EVGA Precision or MSI Afterburner.


NVIDIA's 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.