A Closer Look

MSI's cooler uses five heatpipes that transfer heat quickly from the GPU baseplate to the huge fin array which is cooled by two fans.


Under the heatsink/fan assembly a large metal heatspreader is located which cools memory chips, voltage circuitry and other secondary components. This approach can be useful for extreme overclockers as you can focus on LN2 cooling the GPU only and don't have to worry about the rest of the card, or you can use it to provide extra heating to avoid memory and VRM from getting too cold.


The card has two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors which are specified up to 375 W power delivery - plenty of juice!


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 Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


MSI has placed two voltage controllers on their card so several voltages can be controlled via software.


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.