The EVGA GeForce GTX 570 Superclocked (Cont’d)
Contents
In Figure 4, you can see the video card with its cooler removed and, in Figure 5, a close-up of the voltage regulator circuit. The printed circuit board used with the GeForce GTX 570 is the same one used with the GeForce GTX 580, except that two phases of the GPU voltage regulator circuit were removed, so the GeForce GTX 570 has four phases for the GPU and two phases for the memory chips. Another difference is the number of memory chips: the GeForce GTX 580 comes with 12 1 Gbit chips, while the GeForce GTX 570 comes with 10.
The voltage regulator circuit uses high-end components: SMD capacitors (a.k.a. highly-conductive polymerized capacitors or simply hi-C capacitors), ferrite-core coils (which make the regulator to have higher efficiency because they have lower energy loss than iron-core coils), solid capacitors, and low RDS(on) MOSFET transistors (i.e., higher efficiency).
Figure 4: Video card with the cooler removed
Figure 5: Voltage regulator circuit
The GPU heatsink can be seen in Figures 6 and 7. It has a copper base using vapor chamber technology, which is the same technology behind heat-pipes, and aluminum fins. The cooler has a 70 mm radial fan.
Figure 6: The GPU heatsink
Figure 7: The GPU heatsink
The EVGA GeForce GTX 570 Superclocked uses 10 1 Gbit GDDR5 chips, making its 1,280 MB video memory (1 Gbit x 10 = 128 MB x 10 = 1,280 MB). Each chip is connected to the GPU using a 32-bit data lane, making the video card’s 320-bit memory interface (32 bits x 10 = 320).
The chips used are K4G10325FE-HC05 parts from Samsung, which support up to 2 GHz (4 GHz DDR) and since on this video card memory is accessed at 1.95 GHz (3.9 GHz DDR), there is still a small margin for you to increase the memory clock rate while keeping the chips inside the maximum they support. Of course you can always try to overclock the memory chips above their specs.
Figure 8: Memory chips
In Figure 10, you can see all the accessories that come with the EVGA GeForce GTX 570 Superclocked: mini HDMI-to-HDMI adapter, DVI-to-VGA adapter, two power adapter
s, manual, and installation CD.
Figure 9: Accessories
Before seeing the performance results, let’s recap the main features of this video card.
