Packaging

The Card

Gainward's card is very compact, with a black color theme on the main cooler. A backplate is not available.


Dimensions of the card are 16.0 x 11.5 cm, and it weighs 411 g.


Installation requires two slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 40 mm.


Display connectivity options include one HDMI 2.1, one DisplayPort 1.4a and one DVI port (without analog support).

There is one NVENC and one NVDEC unit in the chip, which supports hardware-accelerated decode for H.264, H.265 and AV1. For encoding H.264 and H.265 are supported, but not AV1.


The card requires no additional power cables, it runs with just PCIe slot power.

Teardown

The fan assembly can be removed independently of the heatsink, which makes it easy to clean both. It also lets you replace the fan should it die after a few years.


While we usually see heatpipes here, the Gainward card uses just a very basic heatsink—which is good enough for the card's low heat output. The heatsink provides cooling for the three memory chips, too, but not for the VRM, which is cooled by the airflow of the cooler.