In spite of sporting a couple of cooling fans whirring away, MSI claims that its new N480GTX Twin Frozr II graphics card offers quiet performance as well as low operating temperatures. The card features thicker heat pipes, military-grade components and support for the latest NVIDIA video technologies. Based on the new PCI Express 2.0 bus architecture, it also benefits from 1536MB of high-speed onboard graphics memory, a couple of DVI ports and an HDMI port.
Gamers and overclockers the world over will be busy attaching their drool cups with this latest announcement from MSI. The N480GTX Twin Frozr II, as the name suggests, features the company's own Twin Frozr II thermal design where a large-area copper-base heat-sink and super high-density fins are joined by two 8cm (3.14-inch) PWM fans and 5 heat-pipes. MSI uses 8mm (0.314-inch) pipes that are said to increase cooling efficiency by as much as 90 per cent.
The N480GTX has a 700MHz Core and 1.5GB GDDR5 onboard memory, is designed to run on the new PCI Express 2.0 bus architecture which offers a bandwidth of up to 5GT/s (gigatransfers per second) and is built using military-grade components such as Hi-c CAP, Solid State Choke and All-Solid caps for extended product lifespan and stability.
There's support for the company's Afterburner overclocking software that gives users control over GPU and memory clock adjustment and GPU overvoltage and the inclusion of the Kombustor burn-in testing tool allows system stability tests to be performed. Of course, being based around NVIDIA's GeForce 480 GTX, the card also gets 3D Vision Surround for multiple display immersion, PhysX effects to add more realism to gaming worlds and CUDA and 3-way SLI performance enhancements.
The dual-fan thermal design is said to reduce operating temperature by as much as 14 degrees Celsius while also offering 4dB lower noise, when compared to MSI's reference design. Output is via a couple of DVI ports and a mini-HDMI port.
MSI has given no official word on pricing but it's unlikely to be situated at the cheaper end of the graphics card market.