Tuesday, August 20th 2013

MSI GeForce GTX 780 Lightning Pictured
Ahead of its launch, pictures of MSI's GeForce GTX 780 Lightning graphics cards were leaked to the web by HardwareZone (now redacted), and reposted by WCCFTech. Pictures reveal never before seen PCB and cooler designs. To begin with, MSI is using a brand new cooling solution called TriFrozr. It combines a large compound dual fin-stack heatsink, to which heat is fed by seven 8 mm-thick heat pipes, with an array of three fans, two larger 100 mm ones on the edges, and a smaller 70 mm one in the center. The fans feature independent control system, which lets you tweak speeds of individual fans, over software. An LED-lit badge doubles up as a GPU load indicator. A swanky back-plate lines the reverse side.
Under this elaborate cooling solution is a brute of a PCB. Drawing power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, the custom-design PCB by MSI features a 20-phase digital PWM voltage regulation, which use a combination of high current chokes, International Rectifier PowIRstage, DirectFET chips, tantalum capacitors, and MSI's GPU Reactor module that cuts out electrical noise. The GPU is wired to 7 GT/s rated Elpida-branded memory chips, and three (that's right, three) GPU BIOS ROMs. One stores a failsafe reference BIOS, another factory-OC air BIOS, and one that primes the GPU for liquid-nitrogen cooling-assisted overclocking. MSI is expected to launch the GTX 780 Lightning on August 28, 2013, priced around $800.
Source:
WCCFTech
Under this elaborate cooling solution is a brute of a PCB. Drawing power from a pair of 8-pin PCIe power connectors, the custom-design PCB by MSI features a 20-phase digital PWM voltage regulation, which use a combination of high current chokes, International Rectifier PowIRstage, DirectFET chips, tantalum capacitors, and MSI's GPU Reactor module that cuts out electrical noise. The GPU is wired to 7 GT/s rated Elpida-branded memory chips, and three (that's right, three) GPU BIOS ROMs. One stores a failsafe reference BIOS, another factory-OC air BIOS, and one that primes the GPU for liquid-nitrogen cooling-assisted overclocking. MSI is expected to launch the GTX 780 Lightning on August 28, 2013, priced around $800.
32 Comments on MSI GeForce GTX 780 Lightning Pictured
Come on, it's a great cooler, but compared to the tightly packaged elegance of the 690 and Titan the Twin Frozr is as generic as it gets for graphics cards.
But yes, pretty colours and all that. :)
I think perhaps I find blower coolers generally look a bit dull. But, I don't know what the shroud is made out of, but I still feel it looks 'cheap' somehow, like an the back of a tv remote. XD
Like the above images (thx puddle), the cooler looks really nice, the shroud looks a little 'cheap' in comparison, but it can be down to the photography or rendering style. The glossy highlights on the above image don't give an impression of quality materials for the shroud.
Looks like a really capable cooler mind, shame about the fan, and the yellow highlights on the shroud kinda suck too imo.