MSI has today announced the release of its latest Nvidia based gpu, the GTX 780 Lightning, featuring a twin BIOS, an enhanced power design, customisable voltage settings and an impressive cooling setup – this card is designed for overclockers and gamers in mind.

The technical specs aren't bad either, with a base clock of 980MHz and a boost clock that breaks the GHz barrier: 1033MHz. There's over 3GB of memory, running at 6008MHz, with a 384bit bus, but all of this does draw a hefty chunk of power. You'll need at least 250w for this card alone.

To make sure all of that internal goodness stays cool, MSI have implemented what it calls, a “triple force architecture,” which combines three fans, with three power load settings, automatically adjusting the cooling power as the GPU is stressed more and more. MSI believes that it's TriFrozr thermal design is so good in fact, that it even claims this card: “exceeds any traditional or custom cooler’s thermal performance.”

Sticking with the theme of three, MSI's 3×3 OC Kit gives you full access to voltage control for the GPU core, memory and PLL through MSI's afterburner software suite, as well as monitoring for GPU, memory and MOSFET temperatures. If you need to go really far however and push the card beyond what it can safely achieve, say you want to try your hand at LN2 overclocking, then you can remove the restrictions on all settings using the secondary OC bios.

Unfortunately all this comes at a price. Don't expect to find MSI's Lightning 780 for anything under £550 for quite a while.

KitGuru Says: This would be overkill for someone like me, but maybe one of our deep pocketed readers is considering a Titan but doesn't want to go quite that far?

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