The Card

With the box and its content out the way it's time to move onto what's important - the card! Upon first glance one thing was going to be clear, it's going to be loud thanks to that tiny little fan.

The card is long but that's to be expected being part of the 8800 series. It's a simple single slot design which is nice but this has unfortunately forced a smaller fan to be used. The front of the card is really taken up by the large heatsink that goes from one end to the other and from the top to the bottom. MSI has of course placed a nice sticker on it so you know where it came from.

Like the 8800GTS, a single PCI Express power connector is needed and is hidden underneath the heatsink fan in the normal position.

Also like the 8800GTS there is just a single SLI connector across the top of the card.

The I/O department gives us two Dual Link DVI ports along with a single TV-Out port. Again a very standard setup for most high end video cards these days.

There are two models coming out, the 512MB one we have here today and a 256MB model, both of which carry GDDR3 memory. The standard clocks come in at 600MHz on the GPU and 1800MHz DDR on the GDDR3. MSI have decided to mix it up a bit; the core gets a 10% increase to 660MHz while the memory gets bumped to 1900MHz DDR.