A Closer Look

MSI's TwinFrozr cooler looks very nice with its shiny metal surfaces. The base is connected to the fin array using three heatpipes. Two very quiet fans then blow air through those fins to cool the card. Due to the design there is also some airflow going onto the memory chips on the front side of the card, but there is no airflow to the memory chips on the back, which does not seem to be an issue considering the massive memory overclock we saw.


MSI is using a single 6-pin PCI-Express power connector on their card, just like the reference design.


The GDDR5 memory chips are made by Samsung, and carry the model number K4G10325FE-HC04. They are specified to run at 2500 MHz (5000 MHz GDDR5 effective).


The UP 6204 offers software voltage control up to 1.35V. It also lacks the monitoring features of the more expensive Volterra controllers. Nevertheless it is good to see MSI using such a controller and bundling their Afterburner software with it to adjust voltages.


MSI has added two voltage measurement points for GPU and memory voltage. This is very convenient for voltmodders because there is no more need to search for the measurement points. However, it is not hard to find these points for experienced overclockers, and beginners will not find anything about this feature in the documentation. Also there is only one "adapter" cable included (the ends are sized nicely to fit the tips of your multimeter probe).


This is AMD's new Juniper GPU, it comes with 1040 million transistors and is produced on a 40 nm process at TSMC Taiwan. The die size is 170 mm².