A Closer Look

The thermal assembly of the MSI N275GTX Lightning consists of two parts, the main cooling assembly with the fans and heatsinks and a metal plate which makes contact with major components on the PCB to keep it cool. The plate feels very solid and is attached with screws to the PCB for optimum contact pressure. While it does not make any direct contact with the fan/heatsink it sits in the airflow created by the fans which does provide a good amount of airflow.


Thanks to its metal design, the fan assembly appears very sexy in my opinion. If you take a closer look you can see the two massive heatsinks that dissipate all heat generated by the GPU in the coolers' airflow.


MSI has added two voltage readouts for GPU and memory voltage on their card. While they look like jumpers, they do not make any configuration changes. Once you attach your voltmeter probes to these pins you can measure the voltage - but not change it. I would have loved to see two trimmers on the card to change voltages - even if the settable range were limited.


Power is delivered to the card via two six pin power connectors. Both are required to run, it won't work with just one connected. To the right of the two power connectors you see the SPDIF input which is used when you want to feed an audio signal into the HDMI output.


The GDDR3 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5RS1H23MFR-N2C. With a cycle time of 0.8 ns, they are specified to run at 1200 MHz (2400 MHz GDDR3 effective).


Instead of the well-known Volterra voltage controllers that allow software voltage control, MSI is using the uP6208 voltage controller. It has an I2C interface, the included software allows GPU core voltage changes via software. Unfortunately at this time no other utility supports reading or writing this controller.


Here you can see NVIDIA's GT200 GPU that powers the GTX 2xx Series. Is is made in a 55 nm process at TSMC Taiwan with 1.4 billion transistors.