A Closer Look

MSI's massive TriFrozr cooler uses five heatpipes of which several are extra thick for maximum heat transfer.


A secondary metal heatsink, which covers the whole card, cools the memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry. Take a look at the second picture and you can see that the thermal pads have not been applied perfectly—some VRMs and memory chips are only covered partially, which shouldn't be a problem because such components don't produce a lot of heat.


Power delivery requires two 8-pin and one 6-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is specified for up to 450 W power draw. Without hardcore solder modding, the card will never even get close to that specification.


Near the SLI fingers, you'll find a dual-BIOS switch that lets you switch to an LN2-optimized BIOS. It can also serve as a backup in case you break your normal BIOS during flashing.


Three ports have been added to let you measure GPU voltage, memory voltage, and PLL voltage with an external multimeter.


MSI included this little metal heatsink with the card. When using an LN2 pot, you'll remove the metal baseplate, which would reduce cooling capacity for the VRMs. The LN2 heatsink does not contain any electrical components; what you see is a thin sticky film that's used to illustrate where the plate has to be installed.


MSI is using an IRF 3595A voltage controller, a rare high-end controller only the Galaxy GTX 980 Ti HOF uses as well.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ4H24MFR-R2C. They are specified to run at 1750 MHz (7000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GM200 graphics processor is the company's flagship GPU. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, with a transistor count of 8.0 billion and a die-size of 601 mm².