GTX 680/GTX 670Ti PCB design unveiled

GK104 is the codename of the PCB and GPU layout that the GTX 680 and GTX 670Ti video cards will conform to. Pictures have emerged in China of the Gk104 PCB with an unknown GPU chip in it (although it’s 50/50 whether it is a GTX 680 or GTX 670Ti). The image shows everything apart from the PCI-E connector bus, but we all know what one of those looks like so that’s nothing too exciting. Before you make too many judgements on what this actually looks like we would like to point out this is an engineering sample meaning that the aesthetics are still subject to change. There won’t necessarily be a green PCB in the final design it has been rumoured they may come with full black PCBs. The card has a 5 phase NVVDC power design which means that the 6Pin and 8Pin provide 5 power channels (2 for the 6 pin and 3 for the 8 pin) and the 8 pin feeds the GPU with power while the 6 pin feeds everything else. The 6pin and 8pin are stacked horizontally instead of vertically as you can see from the top right of the image.

From the picture we can see that the card will use a 256bit memory interface with 2GB of GDDR5 memory as the standard amount ( 8 chips with 256MB of VRAM each). Interestingly this is the first time we’ve seen the GK104 GPU socket and it takes a square design as is traditional with Nvidia. The PCB features both a 2 pin connector and 4 pin connector, the 4 pin connector is likely to be for a fan and the 2 pin connector could be for an L.E.D power control which lights up a GeForce logo on the card cooler. Finally it is worth noting how small the actual GPU die is in comparison to current 500 series models, if the performance is substantially better then it will certainly be an impressive shrink from Nvidia

Sources: ChipHell, Expreview