Product Innards
Product Innards
The cooling solution is a simple but proper one. The cooler uses very thick heat-pipes that pass through a heatsink, with thermal paste tied to the all-copper block. You can also see that the memory area has padding as well as the phase chokes and thus is cooled by this block.
Palit also did apply padding on top of the GDDR5X, the VRM area has a heatsink (the black one). Here I have taken off the backplate btw. There is roughly 2 mm space inbetween PCB and plate.
Here we have the frontside of the PCB, clearly visible the GP102 graphics processor from Nvidia covered with thermal interface material.
The Nvidia GP102 graphics processor is made based on Pascal architecture at a 16 nm process at TSMC. This bad boy has a transistor count of 12 billion and 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 capability of roughly 12,000 MHz (effective data-rate). These are Micron 6ZA77 - D9VRL.
Typically you'd see a uPI based uP9511P controller, however tucked at the rear PCB side you'll run into a OnSemi NCP81274 voltage controller, An 8 phase buck controller regulator and thus allows for selectable 8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1 phases hence the board using 12 phases for the GPU is 5x2 doubled up + 2 for memory.
And yes, that empty SMT trace is missing the one GDDR5X chip, for this 12 11 GB graphics card. Now you know what is on the inside.
Palit added an RGB header to which you can connect your own LEDs that will follow the card's RGB coloring of the card.
The backside PCB, you are looking at the GPU backside. You can see that the VRM area also is properly padded to the backplate. That helps a notch with cooling it as our thermal images will show.