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GeForce GTX 470 — detailed view

Determination of temperature levels, overclocking potential and possibilities to use alternative ways of cooling of GeForce GTX 470 video cards

Design features

Plastic stock cooling system housing removes by a slight squeeze on both side of it:

СО GTX 470 without housing

Radiator of the cooling system is fastened with four screws. Unscrew them to take the rad off:

GTX 470 cooling system

Stock system’s heatsink will later be used as an additional radiator. Just take it off for now:

GTX 470 without stock heatsink

Distances between the corner holes around the GPU — 58.4 mm (2.3″).

1 mm thermal pads between memory chips, power transistors and stock cooling system heatsink are used as a thermal interface. The pads are of good quality, therefore, there is no need to change them.
A closer look of the board:

Top side of GTX 470 board

GPU 4-phase power subsystem is located on the right part of the card:

 GTX 470 power subsystem

Voltage controller NCP5388 is located on the back side of the graphic card:

GTX 470 Voltage controller

The controller does not support I2C control, however, thanks to NVIDIA engineers we now can change VID voltage via SMBus.

On top of the controller there is memory power phase:

GTX 470 memory power subsystem

Memory chips made by Samsung have the following marking K4G10325FE-HC05:

GTX 470 memory chips

Technical specifications of memory chips allow them to operate at 4000 MHz frequency:

Small ClassificationGDDR5 SDRAM
Density, Refresh1G, 8K/32ms
Organizationx32
Interface, VDD, VDDQPOD_15, 1.5V, 1.5V
GenerationE-die
Package170FBGA (Halogen Free & Lead Free)
Temp, PowerCommercial Normal
Speed ( Wafer/Chip Biz/BGD : 00 )0.5ns (4.0Gbps)

Increasing memory voltage can end up real bad — one phase apparently is just enough to power ten memory chips of DDR5 with a total of 1280 Mb. Extreme guys can easily find some volt mods on the Internet, here is just a small recommendation for them — you’ll need to use extreme cooling (LN2) to gain success in it.

Voltage measurement points can be found on the back side of the board:

Back side of the GTX 470 board and voltage monitoring points

According to multimetre there is 1.54 V on memory chips.

Now, after all details are revealed, it is time to go with alternative cooling way.

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