CeBIT 2009 3-8 March, Hannover (Germany), day 3

Page 13 - MSI - Video Controllers

Then we looked through the video controller walls, where like in an art exhibitions hung different MSI products. More or less every video card manufacturer follows the referent design and very often there is not much difference which exactly product you will pick. This year MSI will try to change this. According to their new policy, naturally there will be almost referent model, which will be the first available from a given model family. But from there on the diversities start and are mainly concentrated on utilization of different cooling. We saw many interesting designs, which had primary silence and high performance in mind. Also they introduced the hybrid technology (it seems this word is very fashionable these days) which provides fanless operation in 2D mode, when only the heatpipes cool the core and in 3D mode, when you probably are playing a noisy game, the fans automatically power on and dissipate the excess heat:

In the high end video cards the innovations are mainly regarding the used components. Beside fast memory, high quality electronic components are used. From the below images you cans see, that the chokes for example are pretty solid. Not only they provide long life and stable operation, but they lack the common “humming” which you probably well know from cheaper components. Also interesting addition is the fan that displays the GPU core temperature:

Maybe you noticed the empty header pads on the side of the PCB in the previous pictures. If not- no matter, the interesting about them is that they are meant in future to provide built-in capabilities for easy volt-modding and you will no longer have to change anything on the hardware. Is seems that MSI took the overclocking society even more at heart, which makes their product even more desirable:

Also an interesting addition is on the following picture, which is from the AirForce line and basically will be hardware monitoring panel, which also helps with overclocking. For now this was only design prototype, but very soon it will be supplied with high end video cards: