14 DAY TRIAL // The GeForce GTX 780 Lightning graphics card from Micro-Star International will be one of the company's main stars on the high-end video market when it starts shipping next week.
The company hasn't exactly said much about it itself, but there has been plenty of unofficial coverage, thanks to leaks and reports.
The latest such leak was made by WCCFTech website and consists of an update on the specification, as well as a few hands-on photos.
Said hands-on photos show the workings of the special cooler, as well as the printed circuit board, and it's definitely a feature-packed board.
The PCB pulls energy through two 8-pin PCI Express power connectors. Said energy is then distributed through a 20-phase digital PWM voltage regulation array.
High current chokes are used for this, along with DirectFET chips, tantalum capacitors, MSI's GPU Reactor module (which cuts down on electrical noise), and International Rectifier PowIRstage.
That said, the memory chips that provide the card with its 3 GB of GDDR5 VRAM are 7 GT/s rated Elpida-branded memory chips.
Moving on, the video board possesses a triple-fan cooler called TriFrozr. Obviously, it is an evolution of the Twin Frozr line used on many top-end adapters.
Seven 8 mm copper heatpipes pull the heat from the GPU and memory chips (a back plate handles the rear chips though), while two 100mm spinners and one 70mm fan disperse the heat led to the compound dual fin-stack heatsink. A LED-lit badge acts as a GPU load indicator.
It is possible to tweak the rotary speed of each fan individually, provided that owners install the bundled software.
That leaves the final bomb: the card has not one or two, but three GPU BIOS ROM chips. One as a failsafe, one for the factory overclock (unclear), and one for liquid-nitrogen cooling-assisted overclocking.
When sales start on August 28, the MSI GeForce GTX 780 lightning will have a price of $800 / €600 - €800.
