today we're going to be doing an unboxing for a pretty unique product
this is the MSI n465 GTX twin frozer to
golden edition so this is an all copper design for the cooler that's one of the
big things about this card but there's a couple other things as well it's got a three-year warranty in Canada and the US
it uses their military class concept of components including their tantalum
capacitor solid state chokes meaning no buzzing underload for cards that do
feature that uh that particular aspect of military
class as well as solid capacitors which they claim a minimum of a 10-year
lifetime for it does support all of your typical NVIDIA functionality such as
Cuda SLI including three-way SLI physics
as well as 3D Vision including 3D Vision surround it has 1 gig of gddr5 it has
voltage adjustment uh via MSI afterburner software
and I think I was going to say something else no I was not all right so here's
another little um outline of the military class components so here's the
no buzz thing I was talking about so with ring chokes you can get kind of a
high-pitched uh vibration or it can sound like a squeal uh it's very very
obnoxious if you've ever hadir a card that that uh that does this you'll know
what I'm talking about whereas with a solid state choke you do not hear it and
I've used a couple of MSI's military class cards already and I have observed
that I do not get any whining noises from from them whatsoever so this is a
direct contact okay here we're talking mostly about the cooler so why don't we
take the card out first and then we'll talk about the cooler while we can
actually look at it that would be better ooh it has a black box Black Box
is always nice okay I have to say first of all I
am quite disappointed um it did say golden edition and it turned out that it
was made of copper so I was really hoping that this card would weigh like
you know um 90 pounds but uh it's
getting up there this probably weighs about as much as
um as almost any other graphics card I've encountered i' I'd estimate that's
at a good 4 lbs for that card let's have a look at the accessories that are
included we've got two Molex to one PCIe six pin connector a mini HDMI to HDMI
connector and another two Molex to six pin PCIe connector and then underneath
we have some other stuff we have a quick users guide a D VI to HDMI adapter DVI
to VGA adapter uh their afterburner software and it says Hey download the
latest version right here that's what to do MSI's got that figured out all right
and then what else do we have here this
is how to use their live update uh
software to update your drivers Okay cool so let's get the card out here man
this thing weighs so much that's awesome
uh it looks like it's
using um either a reference PCB or a slightly
modified one it's hard for me to say right now because it does have a twin
frozer cooler on it but you can see on the back it has the hole for the uh for
the stock fan so I'm not sure whether they've altered the PCB I don't have a
GTX 465 with me here on the Park Bench to compare against I'm going to just
take off this little cover on the PC Express uh MSI does these little covers
on everything that's uh very unique to
them okay so these are individually numbered I actually don't know how many
they produced but let's uh let's take a okay let's look at the overall card
layout and then we'll look at the cooler much closer near the end so first of all
this is a PCI Express 2.0 16x card
that's your typical thing as I mentioned before you've got support for two-way as
well as three-way SLI with this particular card you've got your MSI
branding up here on the top with your twin frozer 2 as well as your unique
number and then we have two six pin PCIe
power connectors this is quite a power hungry card because it is based on the
fmy architecture let's move around to
the bottom so this is a four pin pwm fan
that uh is using a little adapter to run two fans off the one header here on the
video card moving around to the back yeah here
we go uh limited offer number 600 98 so
this is card number 698 out of all of the golden edition cards they produced
and on the back we find a custom um IO
shield with MSI logo on it as well as some other vents for air to come out and
then we've got a mini HDMI as well as two DVI ports now this cooler is not
going to exhaust all of the air directly out of the back of the case but it will
do some so you see the fins are actually
okay here I don't know how to give you guys a good angle at this it looks
really cool but it's hard to uh hard to really demonstrate it okay so you see
the fins run this way right so what happens is when the fans blow down it
means the air flow is either going to go that way or that way so basically uh a
small portion of the air flow from this fan will be exhausted directly out of
the case whereas from this fan it's all going to end up in your case as long as
you have good a case air flow this isn't going to be a problem but if you don't
have good case airflow then you can run into a little bit of trouble and I want
to really look at the way the heat pipes are positioned on this cooler because I
think this is really clever they've got five heat pipes directly over the GPU
core so if you look down there you can see right where the GPU is right there
and three of these are 6 mm heat pipes
and two of them are MSI's 8 mm Super
pipes so what the super pipes do is they're positioned at both of the
outside edges and they carry the heat away the furthest from the GPU itself so
what that means is that wherever it's sort of has
to cover a much greater distance they're using super pipes so that you can still
take advantage of the copper fins that are over here and over here at the very
edges of the cooler actually oh yeah that's one of
the things that they do have on here another thing that they're using is
a oh what was I going to say okay I'll just say the next thing I was going to
say okay so the middle heat pipe you can see here goes right to the middle of the
cooler so that one is the one that goes directly over the GPU core and it's able
to take advantage of the air flow air flow from both of these fans and I I
guess I'll just let you kind of look at this for a little bit because it's really cool the way that they lay out
the heat pipes with all five of them carrying heat to completely different
parts of this cooler so that you can really take advantage of this huge
copper block I mean it's basically a brick of copper on top of this card uh
let me see if there's anything else that uh we should talk about briefly here
High heat sink okay that makes a lot of sense oh yeah I should mention that even
though this is an extremely heavy extremely high-end cooler it's still
only a dual slot design so you don't have to worry about uh taking up an
additional slot next to your graphics card another thing that should be noted
and this is kind of okay this is a bit of an odd design choice but you see the
Shroud that they've put over top with your serial number as well as the MSI
branding it actually goes back a little bit further than the video card itself
so make sure you've got enough room in your case to install this card because
it is a touch longer than a regular GTX
465 now MSI claims that this cooler is
up to 16° cooler and up to 21° or 21 DB
quieter than the stock GTX 465 cooler and we will take a look at what kind of
tempts we can get out of it but I think that pretty much covers everything I
wanted to say that is the MSI uh GTX 465
twin frozer 2 golden edition graphics
card