A Closer Look

MSI's Twin Frozr II cooler uses four heatpipes to quickly distribute heat from the GPU baseplate to a large number of fins which are sitting in the air flow of two fans.


Unfortunately the voltage regulation circuitry has no heatsink to help with cooling, only the airflow of the fan on top keeps it cool.


The GTX 460 requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors.


Next to the power connectors is the voltage measurement access. You can measure: PLL, GPU VCore and VMemory voltages.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC05. They are specified to run at 1000 MHz (4000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


MSI is using the uP 6213 for their design which seems to have the functionality required to control the three voltages MSI is offering. On the left of the voltage regulator you find a pair of DIP switches that let you optimize the PWM frequency. Near the bottom edge of the PCB MSI has placed six LEDs that show a bar graph of the current draw of the card (amps, representing GPU load).
Update: Unwinder (creator of MSI Afterburner) just told me that MSI is using an additional uP6262 for triple voltage control.


NVIDIA's new GF104 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan and is based on NVIDIA's Fermi architecture just like the more powerful GF100 on the GTX 480, for example. It uses approximately 1.95 billion transistors. Please note that the silvery metal surface you see is the heatspreader of the GPU. The actual GPU die is sitting under the heatspreader, and is roughly 332 mm² in size.