A Closer Look

Zotac's thermal solution uses five heatsinks and a copper base to keep the card cool.


Voltage regulation circuitry and memory are covered by a secondary heatsink.


The card requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw. We've seen the stacked connector approach on GeForce GTX 600 cards, but NVIDIA recently switched back to the "flat" design for the GTX 700. ZOTAC reused their GTX 680 AMP! Edition PCB so the connector layout would stay, and plugging connectors in and out works well.


ZOTAC uses a Richtek RT8802A voltage controller on their card. It is functionally very similar to the controller on the reference design--both do not offer I2C voltage control or advanced monitoring and are cost-effective solutions.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4G20325FD-FC28. They are specified to run at 1750 MHz (7000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GK104 graphics processor introduced the company's Kepler architecture. Manufactured at TSMC in Taiwan, it is NVIDIA's first chip to be produced on a 28 nm process. The transistor count is 3.54 billion.