A Closer Look

The cooler uses four heatpipes, one of which is a "fat" variant for maximized heat transfer.


A secondary plate cools voltage regulation circuitry and memory chips.


MSI's dual BIOS feature will come in handy when something goes wrong during a BIOS flash.


The card requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors. This configuration is good for up to 225 W of power draw.


You will find some labels printed onto the PCB, near the back of the card. These suggests you can measure GPU, memory, and VDDCI voltages here, but are actually non-functional as MSI is using the same PCB design for several other products with that functionality.


A uP1610 controller provides voltage control.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Elpida and carry the model number W2032BBBG-6A-F. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


AMD's Pitcairn graphics processor uses the GCN shader architecture. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC. The transistor count is 2.8 billion.