A Closer Look

The Twin Frozr III cooler uses five heatpipes to transport heat away quickly from the GPU core to the fins where it gets dissipated.


Under the main cooler with the fans sits a metal heatplate that soaks up heat from the voltage regulation circuitry and the memory chips, which is then transferred to the air being moved by the dual fans.


The card has two 6-pin PCI-Express power connectors which are specified up to 225 W power delivery.


Like on the AMD HD 69xx reference designs, a BIOS switch is present which lets you select between the original BIOS and a backup BIOS in case something goes wrong with a BIOS flash. Combined with the HD 6950 to HD 6970 modding potential this makes an unbeatable combo because it's almost impossible that you screw up enough to end up with a $300 paperweight.


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 has deviated from the reference design voltage controller and is using uPI uP6218 on their card. This controller is well supported in MSI Afterburner to control multiple voltages.


AMD's new Cayman graphics processor is made on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. It uses approximately 2.64 billion transistors on a die area of 389 mm².