Zotac RTX 2070 Mini – Zotac Puts RTX 2070 on an Even Smaller Form Factor and Smaller Price!

Taking a look under the hood

Pulling the cooler from the Zotac RTX 2070 Mini was super easy with only 6 spring screws holding the entirety of the cooler to the PCB. four of the spring screws were at adjacent corners around the GPU and two were at either end of the top and bottom of the VRM portion of the cooler plate. the backplate can only be removed form the PCB once the cooler is removed as it is affixed with several screws accessible from the front of the PCB. Easy removal of the Cooler is great as this means re-pasting would be a very easy job and maintenance in general or even water blocking the Zotac RTX 2070 Mini woudl be a breeze thanks to this and the affixed 8 pin. This is a welcome sight with the recent encounter with teh FE model 2070 and 2060 being a real pain in the ass to pull apart.

The Zotac RTX 2070 Mini cooler you can now see separated form the PCB. Zotac used good quality thermal pads albeit a bit thicker than I would like to see to ensure good thermal transfer. That being said, during testing the VRM and memory seemed to stay plenty cool even when overclocked so I don’t think there’s much to worry about here.

The fan and LED connector are in close proximity to eachother and have enough slack to lay the card and cooler splayed for maintenance without even unplugging them. the LED is a 2 wire connection which is what told me that I would not have a whole lot of options in LED color it simply gives you white and thats ok with me vs having another software to enable/disable lighting. However if you do want RGB im sure there will be plenty of other models that will meet your need for that sort of thing.

Here we take a look at the VRM section of the Zotac RTX 2070 Mini. This GPU being a “non A” model means its not spec’d to be factory overclocked. The Board power is rated at 175W vs the FE which was 10W higher at 185W. One thing that jumped right out to me was the use of individual high/low side driver/mosfet vs the integrated power stages we have seen recently. The VRM is controlled by a ever familiar UP9512R. The change of power components once again could be a cost cutting play but lets take a closer look at these parts and see how they look.

 

Here e dig a bit deeper to see what power circuits are used to power the Zotac RTX 2070 Mini. Starting with memory we see a two phase solution using Fairchild semiconductor (now part of On-Semi) model FDCP5018SG which are the exact same model we saw on the Nvidia FE card.

The GPU VGPU VRM on the Zotac RTX 2070 Mini are separate MOSFET packages as I mentioned above. These are by Ubiq Semi and are model QN3103M6N for the high side and QN3109M6N for the low side. This should easily be able to handle the load of the TU106 but we will have to watch thermals to see how they truly hold up under stress.

The Memory modules are the same as we saw come along on the RTX 2060 Founders edition we just looked at recently. They are Spec’d for 14Gbps but I will be interesting to see if they can clock well or if the memory controller on the “Non A” GPUs are in any way less capable.

 

Here is the TU106-400-A1 or the “non A die, it is said to not be made for pre-overclocked models which has me wondering how it will stack when trying to push it. It is noticeably smaller than it TU104/TU102 bigger brothers and understandably so as it has much less going on under the hood with only 3 GPCs. the total die size is 445 mm² whereas the RTX 2080 comes in at 545 mm² and the monolithic RTX 2080 Ti tops out at 754 mm²