A Closer Look

MSI's cooler uses two large fans and five heatpipes to keep the card cool. Unlike the cooler on the GTX 760 and 770 GAMING, there are two fat heatpipes instead of the one the other cards have.


The front of the card (with the GPU) is covered by a secondary metal heatsink that cools the memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry.


The card requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw. I found plugging the connectors in and out quite difficult because the heatpipe below the power connectors blocks access somewhat. ASUS flipped their power connectors by 180°, which would also solve the problem here.


MSI uses an OnSemi NCP4206 voltage controller on their card. It is a cost-effective solution but does not offer I2C voltage control or advanced monitoring.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4G20325FD-FC03. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GK110 graphics processor was first introduced as a Tesla-only product for powering demanding GPU compute applications. NVIDIA has now also released it as a GeForce GPU. It uses 7.1 billion transistors on a die size that we measured to be 561 mm². The GPU is produced on a 28 nanometer process at TSMC, Taiwan.