Colorful Shows Off The Most Powerful GeForce GTX 560 Ti PCB Featured in iGame Card

Asian graphics card vendor Colorful is at it again with its innovative board designs. This time, the company is after a GeForce GTX 560 Ti (GF114-based) graphics card that boasts of very strong power delivery, and a few mysterious expansion options. Colorful's emphasis has always been on PCB design and choice of high-grade components. This particular card, most likely called the Colorful GTX 560 Ti iGame, is no exception to that. The PCB is particularly long (as much as a GF110-based board).

The additional length is put to use by an innovative arrangement of VRM phases in two rows of four phases. This card employs high-grade chokes with driver-MOSFETs (a component that integrates up/down MOSFETs and driver IC into a single compact package). This 8-phase VRM draws power from three 6-pin power connectors, and can deliver 300W of power to help with record-seeking overclocking feats. There are consolidated voltage measurement points to help manually measure voltages.

The clock speeds of the GPU and memory out of the box are unknown at this point but one can expect them to be pretty high. The card features redundant VGA BIOS loaded into separate EEPROM chips, which can be switched between using a push-switch on the rear-panel. The GF114 GPU is backed by eight Samsung-made 0.4 ns GDDR5 memory chips that are binned to offer the highest overclocking potential.

There are two features on this PCB that are particularly intriguing. On the obverse side, there is what appears to be a mini PCIe slot. We don't know what Colorful plans to use it for, but one can speculate that Colorful could try something similar to Galaxy WHDI, and seat a wireless HD video streaming device there. Moving on to the reverse side, we find another larger slot that looks somewhat like an SO-DIMM slot. We haven't the slightest idea what it could be used for.

All this power demands high-grade cooling, and so Colorful is using a complex heatsink-based cooler. From the GPU base arise 10 heat pipes (arranged in two layers). Five of these bend into a U-shape go to the larger aluminum fin stack with fins stacked parallel to the plane of the motherboard. The other heat pipes pass through a slightly smaller fin stack (over the VRM area), with fins stacked perpendicular to the motherboard's plane. This assembly is ventilated by at least two large (80 mm or more) fans.

As usual, Colorful designs its products for the Asian and European markets.