Product Innards
Product Innards
The cooling solution is a simple but a proper one. One big U, well, S heatpipe through a heatsink, with thermal paste tied to the block. You can also see that the VRM area does not have any padding and is not cooled by this block. However, if we look at the next photo:
Yes, MSI applied a heatsink on top of that VRM area. With the main cooler removed, you can see a small PCB and its components.
Here we have the GP106-400-A1 graphics processor from Nvidia covered with some proper thermal insulation material. GDDR5 memory chips are made by Micron and are specced to run at 8008 MHz GDDR5 (effective data-rate). Tweaked you are looking at a capability of roughly 9000 MHz (effective data-rate).
There are three power phases for the GPU and one for the memory subsystem. The chokes (Super Ferrite Chokes), the grey thingies that state 'SFC' are not covered with thermal padding and they do not get cooling from the cooling block. We'll have a peek at that in our thermal imaging chapter as they might get quite warm.
Right, a peek-a-boo moment just above the heatsink. A uPI based uP9509P is a rather new and recent model voltage controller for many NVIDIA cards.