Removal of the heatsink was an easy process as it was simply attached to the PCB via 4 spring loaded screws with the remainder being to hold the mid brace and VRM heatsink in place. The new TWIN FROZR V design looks very similar to previous incarnations however MSI tell use this version comes with a SuperSU pipe for increased heat dissipation. It will have to perform very well if it is to out compete the two other competing cards as they ran very cool.


The Gaming 4G comprises of 3 separate heatsinks. the first being the Twin Frozr V but the midriff also has a metal brace both to strengthen the card but also to dissipate heat from the memory chips. the final piece of the jigsaw is the VRM heatsink. MSI are to be congratulated for cooling all of the components individually but this also begs the question - why no backplate?


With the heatsinks removed we get our first look at the naked PCB which apart from the on-board components sticks to the reference design. We see that there are more chokes (bigger VRM) and the memory chips missing are found on the reverse.


The VRM is oversized for a GTX 970 and features the 3 'Military spec', MIL-STD-810G certified components comprising of HI-C capacitors, Super ferrite core chokes and sof course, solid capacitors all round.


The memory chips are stamped with SAMSUNG K4G41325FC-HC28 which tells us these chips come as a 4GB package and are rated to run at 3500MHz (7000MHz effective speed) at 1.5v.


The GTX 970 Maxwell core on this model is overclocked from the reference specification to 1140MHz which sits neatly between both GIGABYTE and ASUS overclocked GTX 970s, sadly we again do not see any overclock applied to the memory but from experience we know that there should be plenty of headroom in those Samsung chips.