A Closer Look

ZOTAC's thermal assembly uses a copper baseplate to transfer heat to fins that sit in the airflow of the fan. Despite being connected to the baseplate, the metal piece on the back of the cooler does not really serve any cooling function - it looks nice though.


Once the main cooling assembly is removed, you are left with a small metal heatsink that cools the VRM circuitry of the card.


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.