A Closer Look

Like on all recent high-end cards from NVIDIA, the cooler is a quite complex piece of technology. The main cooling assembly (first picture) uses a copper base to move the heat away from the GPU as fast as possible. As you can see by looking at the white thermal pads, the front cooler cools NVIO, GPU, eight memory chips and seven voltage regulators.
The back plate (second picture) is made from painted metal and cools the eight memory chips on the other side of the card. Also this full metal cover helps protect the PCB from any damage.


The SLI connector is hidden behind a rubber cover. You can combine up to three GeForce GTX 280 cards in SLI to get even more performance.


Power to the card is supplied via 6-pin PCI-Express and 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors. Both are required for operation. Further to the right you see the SPDIF audio input, covered by another rubber cap.


Just like on the G80 (GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra), the output logic has been moved outside of the GPU and resides in this small chip called NVIO. Compared to the G80's NVIO, this one is a new version called NVIO2. This design approach removes all the analog signals and high frequencies of the TMDS link from the GPU silicon, resulting in (a bit) simplified GPU design.
On the other hand this extra part adds cost to the PCB design. Another advantage becomes apparent if you think "GPGPU/ CUDA" - in pure calculation board designs the display output logic is not needed, which allows a cost advantage when built without.


The GDDR3 chips are made by Hynix and have the model number H5RS5223CFR-N2C. Hynix rates those chips at 1200 MHz (= 0.83 ns cycle time). This is the fasted GDDR3 memory variant available from Hynix.


This is NVIDIA's massive GT200 GPU, it comes with 1.4 billion transistors in a 65 nm process. Its die size of 576 mm² makes it the biggest and most expensive GPU produced to date. Please note that the metal you see is not the GPU die, but the heatspreader on top of it.