MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning 6GB Review

1. Introduction2. MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark5. Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Battlefield 4 (1440P & 4K)7. Bioshock Infinite (1440P & 4K)8. Grand Theft Auto 5 (1440p & 4K)9. Metro: Last Light (1440p & 4K)10. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (1440p & 4K)11. Tomb Raider (1440p & 4K)12. Temperatures & Thermal Imaging13. Acoustics Performance14. Power Consumption15. Overclocking16. Closing Thoughts17. View All Pages

In the high end MSI have earned a reputation over the years for creating some of the finest video cards known to man. Today we take a look at one of their latest flagship offerings – the GTX 980 TI Lightning. This card ships with a beautiful triple fan cooler and is supplied in a heavily overclocked state.

You know this card is serious when you see that it incorporates not two, but three PCIe power connectors. MSI also include an adjusted cooling bracket included that is intended for use alongside LN2 pots in order to draw heat away from the MOSFETs. The Lightning is not a card for the faint of heart – at £659.99 inc vat, the price of admission will be too high for many.

GPU	GeForce GTX960	Geforce GTX970	GeForce GTX980	Geforce GTX 980 Ti	Geforce GTX Titan X
Streaming Multiprocessors	8	13	16	22	24
CUDA Cores	1024	1664	2048	2816	3072
Base Clock	1126 mhz	1050 mhz	1126 mhz	1000 mhz	1000 mhz
GPU Boost Clock	1178 mhz	1178 mhz	1216 mhz	1075 mhz	1076 mhz
Total Video memory	2GB	4GB	4GB	6GB	12GB
Texture Units	64	104	128	176	192
Texture fill-rate	72.1 Gigatexels/Sec	109.2 Gigatexels/Sec	144.1 Gigatexels/Sec	176 Gigatexels/Sec	192 Gigatexels/Sec
Memory Clock	7010 mhz	7000 mhz	7000 mhz	7000 mhz	7000 mhz
Memory Bandwidth	112.16 GB/sec	224 GB/s	224 GB/sec	336.5 GB/sec	336.5 GB/sec
Bus Width	128bit	256bit	256bit	384bit	384bit
ROPs	32	56	64	96	96
Manufacturing Process	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
TDP	120 watts	145 watts	165 watts	250 watts	250 watts

The Nvidia GTX980 Ti ships with 2816 CUDA cores and 22 SM units. The memory subsystem of the GTX980 Ti consists of six 64-bit memory controllers (384-bit) with 6GB of GDDR5 memory.

The MSI GTX980 Ti Lightning 6G has received a clock boost over Nvidia’s reference card, with final speeds set at 1,203 mhz(core)/1,304mhz (boost). The memory is also overclocked, from default speeds of 1,753mhz (7Gbps effective) to 1,774mhz (7.1Gbps effective).

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