Here we see the belly of the HSF assembly. Three copper heatpipes stretch from the baseplate out from a thick aluminium heatsink to the more traditional thin finned array.



The frame is attached to the heatsink via four small screws and despite the frame being thin, it is actually less fragile than I originally thought. The two fans are attached via a traditional tri-spoke design. Sadly, there was no sign of LED lighting.



The fans themselves are not what I would call innovative as the eleven blades on each fan feature no additional curves to increase turbulence or indeed to abate noise. They are also very thin, measuring under 10mm which may be an indication of high speed/high noise. We will investigate this later in the review.



The heatsink is split into two separate designs, the main unity being a thick finned design, close to the core of the GPU. This is an interesting design as it is not common at all to have thick finned heatsinks so it remains to be seen how this performs.



The heatpipes stretch away from the thick finned heatpipe and are soldered to the thinner finned array. Rather than the solder being manually applied, it appears that the heatpipes have been dipped to get a better, equalised contact.



Unlike most designs, ZOTAC have employed a full copper baseplate which is also moderately polished. A quick test using graph paper showed that the plate was flat and as you can see from the picture above, shiny. This should ensure a very good contact with the GPU.



The card itself looks very sparse with relatively few solder points. In a traditional design, the core is framed by the memory chips with power circuitry towards the PCIe power ports.



Here we can see the MOSFETs of the ZOTAC GTX560 1GB AMP! from Korean manufacturer MagnaChip. Surprisingly, these are not actively cooled despite the higher than stock voltages used to power the core. All round solid capacitors are also used which will keep overclocks under control and will certainly lengthen the lifespan of the graphics card.




The memory chips used on this particular graphics card are Samsung K4G10325FE-HC04 which are rated to run at 1250MHz (5000MHz effective). I was surprised ZOTAC didn't opt for the increased bandwidth available from Hynix chips that are now common place among AMD cards, especially as this would have given some further overclocking headroom. We'll see if this is a limiting factor when we come to overclock the card.



Above you can see the contact the core of the GPU has with the heatsink. We found this to be one of the best contacts we have seen yet on a GPU. The application of paste was within the 'Goldilocks' zone (not too much, not too little) with a very even spread. The quality of the paste was thick yet easy to remove and as you can see above, the coverage was nigh on perfect.

Let's move on to the Test Setup we will be using for todays review...