A Closer Look

MSI has chosen to go with a huge cooler that uses four heatpipes to transport heat away quickly from the core to the surrounding cooling fins.


Power is delivered to the card via two six pin power connectors. Both are required to run, it won't work with just one connected. If you look closely on the markings of the board you can see that MSI has left space to replace one six pin power connector with an eight pin variant.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Qimonda and carry the model number IDGV1G-05A1F1C-40X. With a cycle time of 1.0 ns, they are specified to run at 1000 MHz (4000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


Instead of the well-known Volterra voltage controllers that allow software voltage control, MSI is using the uP6206 voltage controller. It does not have an I2C interface which means that software voltage control is not possible on that card.


Here you can see AMD's RV790 that powers the HD 4890 Series. Is is made in a 55 nm process at TSMC Taiwan with 959 million transistors.