Video Card

Like the GTX 260 Lightning card the GTX 275 uses an aftermarket cooling option that differs from the stock design. The cooler is different to the GTX 260 one that we saw. This particular one is the Twin Frozr II and while covering up most of the card, we do get to see a fair bit of the cooler itself.

We've got a two-fan design which sits on top of a giant heatsink that carries with it a huge amount of fins along with five heat pipes to help move that heat away from the cooler. We can see that MSI has got a bit of a shroud happening. We can see in the middle we've got the MSI logo while to the right we have the Twin Frozr II one.

Power is coming to the card via two 6-Pin PCI Express power connectors. Closer to the front we have our two SLI connectors and unlike the HD 4890 Cyclone we looked at the other day the cooler doesn't interrupt the connectors here.

MSI has also chosen to mix it up a bit in the I/O department. Across the top we have our vents with the MSI logo. Below that starting from the right we have a VGA port, Dual-Link DVI connector along with a native HDMI connector.

Specifications

One of the more important aspects to the whole Lightning series is the cards overclock settings. Unlike the GTX 260 we looked at, the clocks that MSI advertise are that out of the box without any software having to be installed to achieve those clocks, which was one of our gripes with the GTX 260 version of the card which required MSI's own software in order to switch to the advertised clock speeds.

Looking above, we can see the core has moved to 700MHz. This is up from the stock 633MHz, while the shader clocks stay at 1404MHz. As for the 1792MB of GDDR3 which is twice the amount of a standard GTX 275, we see it coming in at 2300MHz which again is up from a stock clock of 2268MHz DDR.