A Closer Look

We have seen MSI's Cyclone cooler on other cards before and it worked well. It uses two heatpipes that connect the GPU contact area with a large number of fins where heat is dissipated in the fan's airflow.


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).


OnSemi's NCP5388 is a reasonable priced voltage regulator, unfortunately it does not support I2C interface for voltage control. NVIDIA however exposes an API for voltage changes via VID in their NVAPI.


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, its dimensions are not known. NVIDIA did not communicate a die size measurement to the press.