A Closer Look

MSI's cooler uses two large fans and five heatpipes to keep the card cool.


The front of the card (with the GPU) is covered by a secondary metal heatsink that cools the memory chips and voltage regulation circuitry. Please note the memory chip that isn't cooled by the baseplate.


The card requires one 6-pin and one 8-pin PCI-Express power connector. This configuration is good for up to 300 W of power draw. I found plugging the connectors in and out quite difficult because the heatpipe below the power connectors blocks access somewhat. ASUS flipped their power connectors by 180°, which would solve the problem here too.


Unlike the NVIDIA reference design, MSI uses a Richtek RT8802A voltage controller on their card. It is functionally very similar to the controller on the reference design--both do not offer I2C voltage control or advanced monitoring and are cost-effective solutions.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Hynix and carry the model number H5GQ2H24AFR-R0C. They are specified to run at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


NVIDIA's GK104 graphics processor introduced the company's Kepler architecture. Manufactured at TSMC in Taiwan, it is NVIDIA's first chip to be produced on a 28 nm process. The transistor count is 3.54 billion.