MSI N260GTX Lightning Black Edition Video Card Review :: Card

Side shot

Rear of card

Fan

Top view

First thing that you'll notice upon looking at the card for the first time is the twin fans. MSI calls this cooling solution the Twin Frozr Thermal Design. The dual fan design cools down power module (MOSFET, capacitors), memory and GPU at the same time. There are five heat pipes under the fans that dissipate the heat directly.

Heat pipes

PCI Express

Rear of PCB

Two 6-pin power connectors

The card is a dual-slot design meaning that you need to install it into a PCI Express x16 Generation 2.0 slot and have a free adjacent slot to insert the card into a case. The top of the card has two 6-pin power connectors, the same as a regular GTX260 card. There are also two SLI bridges on the top of the card, allowing the user to combine two or three GTX260 cards to improve gaming performance.

Heat pipes 2

PWM

SLI bridges

IO

The rear of the card has the mounting screws for the graphics chip packaging. Also present here is the sticker with the part number and serial number of the card being purchased. The front IO of the card consists of a D-sub connector, a Dual Link DVI connector, and a HDMI connector. You can use this card with the included adapters with an additional HDMI monitor or an analog CRT monitor if you wish to bring the total of each monitor supported to two.