Product Innards
Product Innards
The cooling block is nice to see, of course, the GPU is fully covered, all components including VRM area, GDDR5X memory and anything that gets hot, is padded.
When we look at the PCB you can see what critical components are covered padding and is thus cooled as well as most ICs. The PCB itself is very clean and distinctively recognizable, small alright!
This is the GP102 graphics processor from Nvidia covered with thermal interface material. The Nvidia GP102 graphics processor is based on Pascal architecture at a 16 nm process at TSMC. This bad boy has a transistor count of 12 billion and please do not underestimate the die size, that is 471 mm² you are looking at.
The GDDR5X memory chips are made by Micron and are specced to run at 11,000 MHz GDDR5 (effective data-rate). Tweaked, you are looking at a capacity of roughly 12,000 MHz (effective data-rate). These are Micron D9VRL rated at 11 Gbps / 1.35V, however, Micron also offers new 12 Gbps IC under the product name D9VRN which still have not been used for 1080 Ti that I know of (only 1080).
You can count along with me, eight phases for the graphics proc, however, ZOTAC is doubling these up towards 16 with the help of uP1911R phase doublers. We'll look at the voltage regulator as well. BTW, above you can also see an empty SMT trace for one more memory IC. This is an 11 GB product, 12 GB would be possible. Across the PCB you see a clean component layout which includes premium VRM components. You can see chokes (AIO), that would be a molded indicator (chokes). These concrete alloy chokes help to decrease buzzing noises. And then the square chips to the right are mosfets.
And to the upper segment of the PCB, two more thus two phases for the memory subsystem.
Voltage phase management then - The uPI based uP9511P voltage regulator is used, a recent and much-used model voltage controller for many NVIDIA GP102/GP104 GPU based graphics cards. uP9511 can be configured in 8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1-phase operation and if you counted with me there are eight of them + 2 for memory. So how does Zotac get to 12 phases? Well, look at the next photo.
We spot multiple uP1911R ICs used as doublers to get their 16-phases for the GPU and then two to memory. This is common practice on many graphics cards, these feed into other power stages.
