A Closer Look

MSI's heatsink employs five heatpipes that transport heat away quickly from the GPU to dissipate it in the fins covering most of the card.


Once the cooler is gone, you are left with a big black metal heatsink that covers the memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry.


This little switch was adopted from the HD 6900 Series. Originally it was designed to provide a way to restore the card in case of a bad BIOS flash. MSI has changed this to be a toggle between a normal and a low-noise BIOS. Making the switch requires a reboot, to give the card a change to read the BIOS.


MSI has added three voltage measurement points to their card which are reachable via an attached cable which makes it much easier and safer to monitor your card's voltage using a multimeter.


Another small switch has been placed on the card which lets you disable the overcurrent protection of the voltage regulation circuitry. This could come in handy when overclocking the card with extreme cooling solutions.


The card requires two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix, and carry the model number H5GQ2H24MFR-T2C. They are specified to run at 1250 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


MSI's card uses a uPI uP6218 voltage controller which supports I2C voltage control. It is supported in Afterburner and lets you change three voltages on the card.


AMD's new Barts graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 1.7 billion transistors on a die area of 255 mm². This is also the first GPU to carry the AMD logo instead of the ATI logo.