MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 465 COPPER Twin Frozr Golden Edition Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,598 words · ~7 min read
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today we're going to be doing an unboxing for a pretty unique product
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this is the MSI n465 GTX twin frozer to
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golden edition so this is an all copper design for the cooler that's one of the
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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
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it uses their military class concept of components including their tantalum
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capacitor solid state chokes meaning no buzzing underload for cards that do
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feature that uh that particular aspect of military
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class as well as solid capacitors which they claim a minimum of a 10-year
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lifetime for it does support all of your typical NVIDIA functionality such as
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Cuda SLI including three-way SLI physics
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as well as 3D Vision including 3D Vision surround it has 1 gig of gddr5 it has
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voltage adjustment uh via MSI afterburner software
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and I think I was going to say something else no I was not all right so here's
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another little um outline of the military class components so here's the
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no buzz thing I was talking about so with ring chokes you can get kind of a
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high-pitched uh vibration or it can sound like a squeal uh it's very very
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obnoxious if you've ever hadir a card that that uh that does this you'll know
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what I'm talking about whereas with a solid state choke you do not hear it and
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I've used a couple of MSI's military class cards already and I have observed
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that I do not get any whining noises from from them whatsoever so this is a
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direct contact okay here we're talking mostly about the cooler so why don't we
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take the card out first and then we'll talk about the cooler while we can
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actually look at it that would be better ooh it has a black box Black Box
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is always nice okay I have to say first of all I
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am quite disappointed um it did say golden edition and it turned out that it
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was made of copper so I was really hoping that this card would weigh like
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you know um 90 pounds but uh it's
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getting up there this probably weighs about as much as
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um as almost any other graphics card I've encountered i' I'd estimate that's
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at a good 4 lbs for that card let's have a look at the accessories that are
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included we've got two Molex to one PCIe six pin connector a mini HDMI to HDMI
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connector and another two Molex to six pin PCIe connector and then underneath
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we have some other stuff we have a quick users guide a D VI to HDMI adapter DVI
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to VGA adapter uh their afterburner software and it says Hey download the
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latest version right here that's what to do MSI's got that figured out all right
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and then what else do we have here this
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is how to use their live update uh
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software to update your drivers Okay cool so let's get the card out here man
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this thing weighs so much that's awesome
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uh it looks like it's
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using um either a reference PCB or a slightly
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modified one it's hard for me to say right now because it does have a twin
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frozer cooler on it but you can see on the back it has the hole for the uh for
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the stock fan so I'm not sure whether they've altered the PCB I don't have a
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GTX 465 with me here on the Park Bench to compare against I'm going to just
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take off this little cover on the PC Express uh MSI does these little covers
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on everything that's uh very unique to
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them okay so these are individually numbered I actually don't know how many
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they produced but let's uh let's take a okay let's look at the overall card
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layout and then we'll look at the cooler much closer near the end so first of all
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this is a PCI Express 2.0 16x card
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that's your typical thing as I mentioned before you've got support for two-way as
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well as three-way SLI with this particular card you've got your MSI
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branding up here on the top with your twin frozer 2 as well as your unique
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number and then we have two six pin PCIe
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power connectors this is quite a power hungry card because it is based on the
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fmy architecture let's move around to
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the bottom so this is a four pin pwm fan
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that uh is using a little adapter to run two fans off the one header here on the
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video card moving around to the back yeah here
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we go uh limited offer number 600 98 so
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this is card number 698 out of all of the golden edition cards they produced
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and on the back we find a custom um IO
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shield with MSI logo on it as well as some other vents for air to come out and
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then we've got a mini HDMI as well as two DVI ports now this cooler is not
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going to exhaust all of the air directly out of the back of the case but it will
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do some so you see the fins are actually
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okay here I don't know how to give you guys a good angle at this it looks
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really cool but it's hard to uh hard to really demonstrate it okay so you see
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the fins run this way right so what happens is when the fans blow down it
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means the air flow is either going to go that way or that way so basically uh a
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small portion of the air flow from this fan will be exhausted directly out of
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the case whereas from this fan it's all going to end up in your case as long as
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you have good a case air flow this isn't going to be a problem but if you don't
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have good case airflow then you can run into a little bit of trouble and I want
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to really look at the way the heat pipes are positioned on this cooler because I
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think this is really clever they've got five heat pipes directly over the GPU
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core so if you look down there you can see right where the GPU is right there
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and three of these are 6 mm heat pipes
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and two of them are MSI's 8 mm Super
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pipes so what the super pipes do is they're positioned at both of the
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outside edges and they carry the heat away the furthest from the GPU itself so
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what that means is that wherever it's sort of has
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to cover a much greater distance they're using super pipes so that you can still
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take advantage of the copper fins that are over here and over here at the very
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edges of the cooler actually oh yeah that's one of
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the things that they do have on here another thing that they're using is
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a oh what was I going to say okay I'll just say the next thing I was going to
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say okay so the middle heat pipe you can see here goes right to the middle of the
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cooler so that one is the one that goes directly over the GPU core and it's able
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to take advantage of the air flow air flow from both of these fans and I I
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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
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the heat pipes with all five of them carrying heat to completely different
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parts of this cooler so that you can really take advantage of this huge
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copper block I mean it's basically a brick of copper on top of this card uh
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let me see if there's anything else that uh we should talk about briefly here
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High heat sink okay that makes a lot of sense oh yeah I should mention that even
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though this is an extremely heavy extremely high-end cooler it's still
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only a dual slot design so you don't have to worry about uh taking up an
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additional slot next to your graphics card another thing that should be noted
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and this is kind of okay this is a bit of an odd design choice but you see the
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Shroud that they've put over top with your serial number as well as the MSI
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branding it actually goes back a little bit further than the video card itself
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so make sure you've got enough room in your case to install this card because
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it is a touch longer than a regular GTX
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465 now MSI claims that this cooler is
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up to 16° cooler and up to 21° or 21 DB
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quieter than the stock GTX 465 cooler and we will take a look at what kind of
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tempts we can get out of it but I think that pretty much covers everything I
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wanted to say that is the MSI uh GTX 465
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twin frozer 2 golden edition graphics
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card