A Closer Look

Gigabyte's cooler design is intricate. It uses six heatipes to transport heat away from the copper baseplate quickly. You can also see additional thermal pads that keep memory chips and voltage-regulation circuitry cool. They could maybe use a bit less thermal paste next time.


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


NVIDIA uses the same OnSemi NCP4206 voltage controller on the GTX 770 as on the GTX 780 and Titan. It is a cost-effective solution that does not provide any I2C, so advanced monitoring is not possible. Please note how it sits on its own PCB, so we could see different voltage controllers in the future. The GTX 680 uses a similar approach, but the variety of voltage controllers was relatively low.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4G20325FD-FC28. They are specified to run at 1750 MHz (7000 MHz GDDR5 effective). Please note that this is the first time that 7 Gbps GDDR5 chips are used on a graphics card.


NVIDIA's GK104 graphics processor introduced the company's brand-new 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.