After detaching a number of screws, the cooling solution lifts off the PCB of the graphics card, giving us a closer look at two significant parts. The heatsink and cooling fans.

The cooling fans used on Phoenix GS are FirstD branded and connect directly to the PCB via a single connector. The heatsink utilises four copper heatpipes which blend into a large aluminium heatsink – the GPU makes direct contact with this heatsink and thermal pads cover the memory/VRMs.



Having detached the cooler we can also now clearly see the inner workings of the Phoenix GS. This PCB is larger than the reference design and the inclusion of key components such as VRMs and phases on the right-side identifies a custom design.

The driving force behind the GTX 1060 is of course the GP106 GPU which uses Pascal architecture and is 22nm. Gainward has applied a 7.5% applied to this GPU compared to the NVIDIA reference design and over the page we’ll be testing this graphics card out to see how significant this modification makes.