The heatsink is made up of an aluminium finned array with a nickel coated copper baseplate. 5 heatpipes help wick the heat away from the baseplate and dissipate it across the longitudinal fins. As we have seen previously, this design works extremely well despite the heatsink being an 'open' design with the shroud only covering half of the cooler.



Along with the large heatsink we find the GTX680 OC Twin Frozr also has an aluminium midplate bracket which has two purposes. Firstly, it affords direct cooling to the VRM and memory modules. Secondly, it strengthens the card itself and prevents it from bowing when in-situ under the cards own weight.


Above we see the card with the cooler removed. As you can see, the midplate covers the majority of the card save for the GPU core.



Voltage regulation comes courtesy of a 4+2 design which is identical to the reference design. Each of the four GPU inductors are joined with 3 RDS MOSFET (ON) an solid capacitors which should ensure a clean, stable yet durable VRM design.



The same reference HYNIX memory is included with the MSI card as with the standard NVIDIA GTX680. With a product code of H5GQ2H24MFA R0C we know that this memory is capable of some fantastic results rated at 1.6v to run at 6Gbps so hopefully there will also be some overclocking here too.



Here we see the GK104 core which is fully exposed to the elements save for a nickel surround protecting it from damage from wobbly heatsinks. Pre-overclocked to 1059MHz it makes the AMD HD7970 1GHz edition cards look slow by comparison. The contact as you can see was very good and should ensure near perfect heat transfer for cool running. Will this translate to real world performance though? I guess it's time we found out...