A Closer Look

MSI is using a cooler with five heatpipes on their card.


Once the main heatsink is removed, two secondary baseplates become visible; one cools the memory chips, the other the VRM.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.


MSI has upgraded the power input to a 6-pin and an 8-pin, which is specified for 300 W of power draw.


With Pascal, NVIDIA made some changes to how SLI works. In a nutshell, for 4K at 60 Hz and above, NVIDIA recommends new high-bandwidth SLI bridges it dubbed "SLI HB." These bridges occupy both SLI fingers. Traditional triple- and quad-SLI setups are gone as well. Only certain benchmarks can run more than the dual-SLI setup to which all games are limited.