14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA's Fermi-based GeForce GTX 465 graphics adapter made its stealthy debut yesterday, after which the Santa Clara, California-based GPU maker's partners took their won turns. As the third adapter with support for DirectX 11, this newcomer will cater to the needs of the mainstream market. Most of NVIDIA's partners stuck to the reference clocks and only made minor adjustments to the cooling, if any. What differs from when the GTX 470 and GTX 480 were released, however, is the fact that hardware makers are not prohibited from immediately launching custom models.
MSI is among those that decided to immediately go that extra mile and leave a more noticeable imprint on its products. To this end, it unleashed not just a GTX 465, but also revised GTX 480 models, namely the N465GTX Twin Frozr II, the N480GTX Twin Frozr II and N480GTX HydroGen.
The N480GTX HydroGen is essentially a GTX 480 that gives up the reference cooling module in favor of a liquid cooling solution. Its waterblock takes up a single slot, is made of copper and covers not just the 40nm GF100 GPU, but also the I/O chips, voltage regulators and the GDDR5 memory. If anything, this video controller should be easier to set up in multi-GPU configurations, even on motherboards whose PCI Express slots aren't very far apart.
The other GTX 480, the N480GTX Twin Frozr II, obviously employs the now well known active cooling mechanism with four copper heatpipes and, naturally, the ability to push operational temperatures noticeably lower than the reference ones.
The N465GTX Twin Frozr II uses the same two-fan active cooler as the N480GTX, obviously, but its heatsink has an all copper construction. Otherwise, its build is similar. Unfortunately, Micro-Star International chose to reveal neither the clock speeds nor any details regarding pricing and availability.