A Closer Look

EVGA's ACX cooler uses three heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU's surface.


A second baseplate covers empty PCB space without providing any cooling function. I'm not sure why EVGA uses it. It's not used to stabilize against PCB bending as the cooler's shroud already takes care of that, with the PCB touching the cooler, which keeps it from bending after flexing a little.


The card requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw.


Unlike the NVIDIA reference design, EVGA uses a Richtek RT8802A voltage controller on their card. It is functionally very similar to the controller on the reference design--both do not offer I2C voltage control or advanced monitoring and are cost-effective solutions.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GK104 graphics processor introduced the company's Kepler architecture. Manufactured at TSMC in Taiwan, it is NVIDIA's first chip to be produced on a 28 nm process. The transistor count is 3.54 billion.