A Closer Look
Cooler disassembly on Palit's card works slightly differently than on most other boards. First, you remove the fan shroud, which includes the two fans.
Once the fan assembly is removed, you have access to the main heatsink with four heatpipes. It also cools the voltage regulation circuitry and the memory chips.
The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during handling and installation.
Palit has included a dual BIOS feature on their card. The BIOSes being identical, one acts as a safety measure against a failed BIOS flash.
Palit has also included solder OC tweaking and measurement points.
Unlike other board vendors, Palit has decided to keep the 6-pin of the reference design and not upgrade it to an 8-pin. This power input configuration is specified for up to 150 W of power draw.
The NVIDIA GTX 1060 reference design used a voltage controller from uPI. Palit replaced it with an OnSemi NCP81174.
The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4G80325FB-HC25. They are specified to run at 2000 MHz (8000 MHz GDDR5 effective).
NVIDIA's GP106 graphics processor is the second consumer chip using the Pascal architecture. It is produced on a 16 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, and has a transistor count of 4.4 billion and a die size of 200 mm².