A Closer Look

MSI's five-heatpipe cooler seems to be the same as on the normal GTX 580 Lightning with the exception of the fan blades. According to MSI they will turn white when the card overheats, I couldn't replicate that behaviour though. Also MSI has added a dust removal system which switches the fan rotation direction to minimize dust buildup.


The cards has two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This configuration is good for up to 375 W power draw.


MSI has included three easy to access voltage measurement points near the top edge of the PCB. You have access to GPU Voltage, Memory Voltage and PLL Voltage. I attached one of the included measurement cables to the VGPU point to show how the system works - there are three cables included.


MSI has placed several DIP switches on the board for some basic non-software control of the card. Starting from the top you have Memory voltage and GPU voltage which provides an instant boost to those voltages, next we have PWM ClockTuner which lets you select the PWM clock frequency from 260 MHz to 310 MHz. Finally we have a switch to increase PLL voltage and one to remove the overcurrent protection of the card. An extra DIP switch is located near middle of the board and is used to enable several LN2 fixes which help with stability when using Liquid Nitrogen cooling.


The BIOS switch will let you select between the default BIOS and a BIOS that has no cold slowdown issue. When GPU temperature goes negative, the GPU sometimes thinks it is overheating which would cause it to reduce clock speeds. Also the second BIOS serves as a backup in case something goes wrong during a BIOS flash.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24MFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


MSI has put two voltage controllers on their card to enable their triple-voltage change feature.


NVIDIA's GeForce 110 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 3.0 billion transistors which is 200 million less than the GF100. Please note that the silvery metal surface you see is the heatspreader of the GPU. According to NVIDIA, the die size of the GF110 graphics processor is 520 mm².