A Closer Look

MSI's thermal solution uses six heatpipes to keep the card cool. The main GPU heatsink also cools four memory chips near the GPU.


The included metal backplate has no cooling function, but looks nice and protects the back of the card against damage during handling.


With the primary heatsink removed, you can see a secondary one that sits on the voltage regulation circuitry and cools most of the memory chips. For users of liquid nitrogen, MSI includes another heatsink that cools the VRM area without blocking the GPU area.


The card requires one 6-pin and two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors. This configuration is specified for up to 450 W power draw.


The card's dual-BIOS feature is used to switch between the normal and a special liquid-nitrogen BIOS.


These three white connectors can be used to directly monitor the GPU and memory voltages. Look at the second photo: something went wrong while the labels were placed as two of them sit on top of a capacitor instead of a cable plug.


We've seen the IR 3567 voltage controller on the AMD reference design. It supports software voltage control and monitoring via I2C and is well supported in overclocking software.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung and carry the model number K4G20325FC-HC03. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


AMD's Hawaii graphics processor uses the GCN shader architecture. It is produced on a 28 nm process at TSMC, Taiwan, with 6.2 billion transistors on a 438 mm² die.