The card came into our test lab in usual MSI box but, rather heavy one. Besides usual accessories (drivers, manual, cables and DVI-VGA converter) in the package was the main culprit for additional weight of the package – graphics card itself. Cooling system used on this card is nicely designed, very complex and above all unexpectedly heavy.

This cooling solution is mostly made out of aluminum with lot of heat pipes made out of copper. Of course, now, the name SuperPipe makes sense doesn’t it? Although there are 5 heat pipes, which is nice, two of these are thicker than the others (8mm thicker). Of course those thicker heat pipes (MSI SuperPipe Technology) conduct heat much better that regular ones. Beside these special heat pipes this graphics card has cooling system cover made out of metal alloy with brushed finish instead of plastics. This also improves thermal characteristics of system as a whole.

For this system to work properly, besides aluminum fins, two 70mm fans are used which offer satisfactory performances. There are better solutions but these work ok, but generate more noise than most other custom cooling solution that we saw. Under this massive cooling system we found GT200 GPU with 240 Stream Processors and 1GB 0.8ns GDD3 memory (signed by Samsung). Memory section is really good so no noise was generated by power section coils. Frequencies are little bit higher than default values set by NVIDIA: 680MHz for GPU and 2.5GHz for memory.