Product Showcase
One of the key ingredients to the MSI Gaming series is a quality builds armed with high performance cooling. Combined with power, frequency, load and thermal limiters MSI will try to force as much performance out of the card at a maximum threshold of roughly 65~70 Degrees C for this GeForce GTX 980 model card.
The card is based on a nice thin dual-slot dual fan cooling solution, revision V of TwinFrozr. The TwinFrozr V’s Fans actually stop spinning below 60°C to reduce noise and increase fan life time. Zero/Hybrid Frozr is a throwback to 2008 when MSI was the first to market high-end, so that is zero noise graphics cards thanks to the fan stopping in low-temperature situations. The fans can be controlled in-dependant from each other with the help of MSI software.
The card has a length of 28 cm including the cooler. So that is a fairly good size, not too big.
Here is an inner view of the TwinFrozr 5 cooler, the two fans span 10cm each. But there's an advantage there as the heatsink fins cover 90% of the fan blade diameter, increasing heat dissipation ability. The heatpipes used are 2x 8mm SuperPipe and 2x 6mm heat pipes. MSI covered them with a heat spreader made out of nickle plated copper. At the top side of the card there is an LED lit logo, an LED illuminated GAMING Dragon.
The PCB design is incredible clean, you can see it is all nice, orderly and you spot good quality components only. You can spot the ten SFC chokes here nicely. MSI uses MIL-STD-810G certified components for its Gaming cards because only these components have proven to be able to withstand the torturous circumstances of more extreme gaming and overclocking.
At the top of the card you can see the two power headers. The reference designs all have two 6-pin headers, this one offers one two 8 pin headers. So that should allow you to get a little more amperage into the card for hopefully an improved tweaking experience.
As you can see, the card has SLI connectors so if you've got cash to spend, 2, 3 and 4-way SLI are an option to pursue, though we always recommend two cards maximum for the best scaling and as few driver issues as possible. Admittedly, the new design looks nice, all dark and red themed. Tweaked we’ve seen this 980 board reaching over 1.5 GHz on the Turbo clock frequency very easily, very nice but we'll show you that later on in this article.
