A Closer Look

MSI's cooler uses four heatpipes that transfer heat to a large fin array sitting in the airflow of the two fans.


VRM circuitry is cooled by a simple metal heatsink which does the job fine.


Two six-pin power connectors can be found near the back of the card. Combined with the power delivered via PCI-Express slot, this input configuration is good for up to 225 W power draw.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 1250MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


A cost effective uP6213 voltage controller is responsible for creating the GPU voltage. While it does not offer voltage control via I2C, NVIDIA's driver exposes a limited range VID based API.


NVIDIA's GeForce 114 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses the same architecture as NVIDIA's GF 104 but with improvements on the transistor level to reduce power consumption. Compared to the GTX 560 Ti, which uses the same GPU, the shader count has been reduced and clock speeds are different.