A Closer Look

The only change in MSI's new Cyclone II cooler compared to the first generation Cyclone seems to be the shroud. Baseplate and heatpipe configuration seem unchanged. A small change is visible in the fan blades which are now more curved, a feature MSI calls "propeller blade technology", which promises higher airflow per RPM.


The card requires a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector, which is just enough to handle the card.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24MFR-T2C. There are two densities of memory chips, four 1 Gbit (128 MB), and two 2 Gbit (256 MB), to populate the 192-bit wide memory interface, and achieve 1024 MB of total memory. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


As voltage controller a cost efficient ONSemi NCP5395 is used, it provides basic voltage control using VID via NVIDIA's driver.


NVIDIA's GeForce 116 graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses the same architecture as NVIDIA's GF 106 but with improvements on the transistor level to reduce power consumption.