A Closer Look

MSI's TwinFrozr cooler uses five heatpipes to transport heat away from the GPU to a large heatsink, where the two fans take care of removing it from the card.


Once the main heatsink is removed, you can see the secondary heatsink which covers memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry.


The card requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors. This configuration is good for up to 225 W of power draw. NVIDIA claims that this stacked power connector configuration is better, but I personally don't like it. It makes plugging cables in and out more difficult and the bottom connector is rotated by 180° from what we are used to.


MSI uses use a Richtek RT8802A voltage controller on their card, just like the reference design. This is a fairly simple controller which does not offer any monitoring features or software voltage control. Voltages are controlled via VID pins that are directly connected to the GPU.
Also note how the chip sits on its own little PCB, which could hint that this is a modular design that will accept different, more advanced controllers, too.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24MFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


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