A Closer Look

A metal plate covers the back of the card. Since there are no major heat sources on this side, the plate acts mostly as protection of components, it might help a little bit to keep the card cool, but it won't be by a big amount.


MSI's Twin Frozr III cooler uses five heatpipes to move heat away quickly from the GPU surface into a large number of fins that sit in the airflow of two fans.


The last piece to come off is this metal plate that cools the VRM circuitry and the memory chips. Such a multi-component construction will come in handy in case you are going to watercool the card, you can focus on cooling the GPU and won't have to worry about the rest.


MSI has added three voltage measurement points on their card. They are used together with breakout cables that greatly reduce the risk of causing a short circuit with your probe tips. The labels are a bit hard to see, it seems the PCB was designed before anyone looked at what the cooler will cover. No big deal though, as hardcore overclocker such things should not stop you.


These switches enable some voltage tuning functionality that works without any software! On my sample a sticker covered part of the print on the PCB, it was easy to peel off though. Voltage can be controlled by simply setting the voltage related DIP switches to the ON position and the voltage will be increased by a fixed amount. An additional switch is available to control the voltage regulation PWM frequency and a last one is used to disable the voltage regulator's over current protection.


A 6-pin and two 8-pin power connectors ensure there is enough juice flowing into this monster. This configuration is specified up to 450W power draw.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


uPI's uP6225 is MSI's voltage regulator of choice because it lets you control three voltages. In this case GPU voltage, memory voltage and PLL voltage.


NVIDIA's GF100 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 3.2 billion transistors which makes it the most complex GPU built to-date. Please note that the silvery metal surface you see is the heatspreader of the GPU which measures 42.3 x 42.3 mm. The actual GPU die is sitting under the heatspreader, and roughly 526 mm² in size.