A Closer Look

MSI's cooler uses five heatpipes that transfer heat quickly from the GPU baseplate to the huge fin array which is cooled by two fans.


Under the heatsink/fan assembly a large metal heatspreader is located which cools memory chips, voltage circuitry and other secondary components. This approach can be useful for extreme overclockers as you can focus on LN2 cooling the GPU only and don't have to worry about the rest of the card, or you can use it to provide extra heating to avoid memory and VRM from getting too cold.


The card has two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors which are specified up to 375 W power delivery - plenty of juice!


MSI has included three easy to access voltage measurement points near the top edge of the PCB. You have access to GPU Voltage, Memory Voltage and PLL Voltage. I attached one of the included measurement cables to the VGPU point to show how the system works - there are three cables included.


MSI has placed several DIP switches on the board for some basic non-software control of the card. Starting from the top you have Memory voltage and GPU voltage which provides an instant boost to those voltages, next we have PWM ClockTuner which lets you select the PWM clock frequency from 300 MHz to 350 MHz. At the bottom you have an option for "OCP Unlocker" which disables the overcurrent protection of the voltage regulation circuitry (does not affect AMD PowerTune).


The BIOS switch will let you select between the default BIOS and a BIOS that has increased CCC Overdrive limits of 2000 MHz GPU and 2000 MHz memory, as well as a 2.5x increased PowerTune limit for the board. Please note that the writing on the PCB shows as "Silence" and "Performance" which is not accurate. MSI has promised to fix this in the final retail version.


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).


MSI has placed two voltage controllers on their card so several voltages can be controlled via software.


AMD's Cayman graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 2.64 billion transistors on a die area of 389 mm².