A Closer Look

MSI's cooler uses four heatpipes and two large fans to keep the card cool.


You can see a secondary metal plate once the main heathsink is removed. It provides cooling for memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry.


The card requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power cables for operation. This power configuration is good for up to 225 W of power draw.


MSI's GTX 660 HAWK comes with the dual BIOS feature that we've seen on many AMD cards. The switch for the BIOS is located near the middle of the top edge of the card. I had some difficulties finding it because it's a bit recessed due to the cooler sitting on top of it.

The second BIOS is optimized for use with liquid nitrogen, but can also act as a backup in case something goes wrong with a BIOS flash.


You will find MSI's GPU reactor, which uses an additional PCB to provide extra voltage filtering to the GPU, on the back of the card. It has been placed as close as possible to the GPU to maximize the reactor's effect.


Three easy-to-use voltage check-points are located near an edge of the card. They provide measuring access for GPU, memory, and PLL voltage.


For voltage control, the card uses a CHiL CHL 8318. It offers many software voltage control and monitoring features, but is quite new, which means that support in overclocking software is limited.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4G20325FD-FC03. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GK106 processor is produced on a 28 nm at TSMC, Taiwan. The transistor count is 2.54 billion.