A Closer Look

MSI's heatsink with its five heatpipes looks powerful. Two of these heatpipes are even extra wide, which improves heat transfer.


A plate has been placed on the front of the card, below the cooler, to improve stability against bending. The highlighted portion of the second picture points to a missing thermal pad that is supposed to cool the VRM circuitry. I haven't noticed any negative effects due to it, but it's still worth mentioning.


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.


MSI is using the same OnSemi NCP4206 voltage controller as on the reference design. It supports software voltage control and monitoring via I2C.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by SK Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-R2C. They are specified to run at 1750 MHz (7000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


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

Please note that the GPU on the GTX 780 Ti is marked "B1", whereas previous cards used "A1". Whether this is really an updated GPU or simply a different label is not known. NVIDIA has not discussed A1 vs. B1 GPUs with the press.