As you can see, MSI continues its tradition with VGA cards, using a red PCB.

On the front side of the card, there's a white, semi-transparent fan that takes in cold air and spreads it in a sophisticated way across the card's surface.

On the rear side, there's a similar "Free-boundle" fan and heatsink to provide the same flow of air over some memory modules. However, in the event the extra fan and heatsink do not allow for easy installation of the card on the motherboard, MSI discretely advises removal of the rear fan and heat-sink. After all, most FX5950 powered graphics cards don't have a rear heat-sink and it was MSI's decision to include it for overclocking purposes, hence the characterization as "Free-boundle".

Without much hesitation, we removed both fans to take a more detailed look at the card's layout.

It seems MSI hasn't changed much of NVIDIA's original reference board design. Here we can see the DDR memory modules spread around the FX5950 chipset.

This is how the card looks with the rear heat-sink removed.

The NV38 chipset is hidden behind nVidia's FX5950 cover which we dared not remove.

One of the sixteen Hynix DDR memory chips.

On board we found a Philips video encoder/decoder chipset for the Video-In-Video-Out interface.

Also a DVI transmitter from Silicon Image.