NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti Video Card Review

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Cont’d)

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.

Figure 4: Video card with the cooler removed

The voltage regulator circuit uses solid capacitors, ferrite-core coils (which make the regulator to have higher efficiency because they have lower energy loss than iron-core coils), and low RDS(on) MOSFET transistors (i.e., higher efficiency).

Figure 5: Voltage regulator circuit

The GPU heatsink can be seen in Figures 6 and 7. It has a copper base, three six-mm heatpipes, aluminum fins, and an 80 mm fan.

Figure 6: The GPU heatsink

Figure 7: The GPU heatsink

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti uses eight 1 Gbit GDDR5 chips, making its 1 GB video memory (1 Gbit x 8 = 1,024 MB = 1 GB). Each chip is connected to the GPU using a 32-bit data lane, making the video card’s 256-bit memory interface (32 bits x 8 = 256).

The chips used are K4G10325FE-HC04 parts from Samsung, which support up to 2.5 GHz (5 GHz DDR) and since on this video card memory is accessed at 2 GHz (4 GHz DDR), there is still a huge 25% 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