A Closer Look

GIGABYTE's thermal solution uses just three heatpipes to transport heat away from the GPU. You can also see the thermal pads cooling memory on the picture above.


A compact metal heatsink has been installed on top of the voltage regulation circuitry to take care of the heat it produces.


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. It's nice to see that Gigabyte did away with the stacked power connector of the reference design which made cable handling more difficult than this traditional approach.


GIGABYTE uses use a Richtek RT8802A voltage controller on their card, just like the reference design. This is a fairly simple controller which does not offer any monitoring features or software voltage control. Voltages are controlled via VID pins that are directly connected to the GPU.
Also note how the chip sits on its own little PCB, which could hint that this is a modular design that will accept different, more advanced controllers, too.


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 new GK104 graphics processor introduces the company's brand-new Kepler architecture. It is NVIDIA's first chip to be produced on a 28 nanometer process, at TSMC Taiwan. The transistor count is 3.54 billion.