The card
As noted earlier, the MSI Twin Frozr Gaming R9 280X OC Edition graphics card
features MSI's quite famous Twin Frozr IV cooler with a total of five heatpipes,
three 6mm and two 8mm ones. It has two 100mm fans which cool the large heatsink
connected to the nickel-plated copper base plate via aforementioned heatpipes.
As a part of the MSI Gaming series, the Twin Frozr Gaming R9 280X OC Edition
uses red on black color scheme and the overall build quality of the cooler is
quite good.
For its Twin Frozr Gaming R9 280X OC Edition, MSI makes use of an AMD
Radeon HD 7970 reference design PCB. The PCB is almost identical to the
reference card and only
changes which we noticed are that the power design components are a bit different and there
is the full number of phases, 6+1+1+1 (GPU-Memory-PLL-PCIe) phases versus 5+1+1+1 for the reference 7970 card. Other than that
MSI also put an aluminium plate over the memory chips and the VRM area.
Checking the voltage regulation chip we find a digital multi-phase controller
CHiL CHL8228G from International Rectifier that is taking care of both GPU and
memory.
The memory chips used are made by Elpida and carry the model number
W2032BBBG-6A-F. They are specified to run at 1'500 MHz (6'000 MHz effective).