A Closer Look

Palit's cooler consists of several components, the first to go off is the black shroud with the orange fan. One thing I would like to point out that the fan blades seem to be quite brittle. During the review I managed to break off one of the blades - something that had never happened in around 200 reviews before, and I handle all cards the same way.


The heatsink assembly feels much more solid and uses two heatpipes and a copper base to transfer heat to a large number of fins where heat is dissipated into the airflow of the fan.


The final piece to come off is that simple black metal heatsink that cools the voltage regulation circuitry. It seems to be completely adequate for a card like the GTX 460 Sonic.


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 have I2C 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.