Under the Heatsink

Before we go through the motions here it should be mentioned that talking apart the heatsink assembly on this card is not easy since the top and bottom portions are attached to one another with a clip system. You should be extremely careful when doing this since any slip-up will mean a real danger of damaging your card. Do this at your own risk and note that Hardware Canucks takes no responsibility if you damage your card.


After removing the necessary screws and gently (and we mean VERY gently) prying the bottom heatsink off the card we are greeted with eight of the sixteen memory modules. Each of them has a thermal pad placed over it so the heat they generate is easily transferred to the aluminum heat spreader.

To continue the removal of the upper heatsink you will need to remove the two screws which are placed right next to the ram modules.


The first thing you will notice is that the IHS placed on top of the G200 core is absolutely immense. It is important to note that what you are seeing here is NOT the actual core of the G200 but rather an internal heatsink much like we see with modern CPUs. This disperses the heat from the core over a more even area so it can be easily dispersed by the cooler.

The power distribution end of this card is a confusing maze of voltage regulators and transistors with surprisingly few capacitors considering the amount of power the GTX 280 needs when under load.


The IHS of the GTX 280 is actually slightly larger than that of the last IHS-equipped Nvidia card; the 8800GTX. We guess this is what you get when packing 1.4 billion transistors into one core.

The memory used on this card consists of two banks of 64MB x 8 Hynix H5RS5223CFR-N2C GDDR3 memory for a total of 16 ICs. This memory is rated to run at 1200Mhz (2400Mhz effective) with 2.0V and a latency of 0.8ns.


In the first pictures you may have noticed a small chip close to the backplate. Even though HD decoding is now done on the GPU itself, the NVIO chip from the G80 series of cards makes a comeback on the GTX 280. This chip is basically responsible for all input and output data that doesn’t originate from or goes through the PCI Express interface.