MSI has always made pretty video cards. Dull gray colored PCBs are the norm in this industry. Personally, as someone who uses a lighted windowed case, I like to see cool looking videocards with nice vibrant colors like red. ATI cards and MSI cards have red colored PCBs on them and I've always favored red colored video cards.

The cooling system of the 5700 Ultra is completely different from the one used on Nvidia's reference board and BFG's 5700 Ultra. The fan is a cool round shaped fan with 11 fins. The heat sink surrounding the fan is a circular one in an aesthetically pleasing symmetrical design. Memory heat sinks cover the memory in 4 pairs.

The length of video cards in recent memory concerns me as I hate cards that require me to move cables or hard drives to install a video card. MSI's 5700 Ultra is 8 3/4" in length, which is a little shorter than BFG's 5700 Ultra. This fit easily into my med tower ATX case, but is a full inch smaller than the Radeon 9800 Pro I had in my machine prior.

MSI included 8 memory chips of 128-bit DDR memory clocked at 450 MHz. With 8 bits/byte conversion that gives a total of 128 MB of memory with an effective clock rate of 900 MHz. The 5700 Ultra has a 128 bit memory bus, giving a maximum theoretical memory bandwidth of 14.4 GB/second (450x2x128/8=14.4 GB/second). The memory chips are laid out in 4 sets of 2, 2 sets on the front of the PCB, 2 sets on the back of the PCB.

The input/output block is fairly typical of video cards today. Virtually every video card released today includes a DVI-I connector, a VGA connector, and a S-Video Out Out connector. This allows dual monitors via an adapter for the DVI-I to a second VGA connector and the included VGA connector.