With the package out the way it’s time to move straight onto the more important things, like the card! The card’s long! That’s to be expected though considering there’s two cores on board. The cooler takes up the whole front of the card and there really isn’t much else to it.
MSI have of course made the card look like it’s from them with some well placed stickers over the card.
Turning the card over we can clearly see where the two cores are placed. The memory also sits on the back of the card and the reference cooler design has plates that cover it. We’re not really sure if it’s necessary or not, but as long as the cooler does a decent job of keeping the card’s temperature levels well controlled then that’s the main thing.
Moving to the front again we can see we have two power connectors. One is a 6-pin connector while the other is an 8-pin. The 8-pin is generally quite annoying as a lot of power supplies don’t have the connector for them. Fortunately MSI have chosen to include a 6-pin to 8-pin connector to help with this issue however.
As we travel across the top of the card we can see the heatsink for the cores extends all the way to the top of the card.
Continuing across the top of the card we can see a single Crossfire connector. This is the first time we’ve seen a single Crossfire connector as opposed to the typical dual design. Word was that the dual design was due to the patent NVIDIA had on the SLI connector and single design, so it’s interesting to see AMD use a single one in this case.
The I/O department really looks like your standard HD 3870 with just two Dual Link DVI connectors and a simple TV-Out port. We’ve seen some companies opt for a quad Dual Link DVI design but at the moment it seems that it’s only present on cards that use a custom cooling solution which doesn’t go all the way to the front of the card.
Specifications
MSI have decided to spice up the clocks on their card a little bit, bumping up the core in this case.
The default clock on the core is 800MHz but MSI have bumped this up to 860MHz. The 1GB of GDDR3 memory though remains at the same 1800MHz DDR. You can see below the exact details on the card.
