A Closer Look

MSI's cooler uses four heatpipes to transport heat quickly away from the GPU.


After removing the main cooler, we find an additional small heatsink on the card which cools voltage regulation circuitry and memory chips.


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.


For voltage control, the card uses a Richtek RT8802 voltage controller which we have, for example, seen on the NVIDIA GTX 680 reference design.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GK104 graphics processor introduced the company's brand-new Kepler architecture. It is NVIDIA's first chip to be produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The transistor count is 3.54 billion.