A Closer Look

As mentioned before, the cooler is the NVIDIA reference cooler which uses a copper baseplate and two heatipes to keep the card cool. The voltage regulation circuitry on the card is not cooled at all - except for the airflow generated by the cooler.


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).


As voltage regulator an OnSemi NCP5388 is used. Even though it does not offer I2C voltage control, NVIDIA's drivers expose an API to adjust the GPU voltage using VID commands.


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, and is roughly 332 mm² in size.