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The MSI box artwork is rather bright and eye catching. ‘Built to be Perfect' is a tagline we don't see often. The rear of the box focuses on the cooling and it points out the ‘OC' letter on the yellow part of the cooler shroud.
MSI claim the use of ‘Military Class 4 components' ensuring the highest levels of stability. There is also mention of the ‘Mystic Lights' – which is basically a customisable lighting system positioned at the top of the card. The lighting by default is set to yellow.
The bundle includes literature on the product, including a ‘Quick User's' guide.
MSI forms the accessory bundle from a long, flexible SLI ribbon, a 6-pin to 8-pin PCIe power adapter, and three cables for the V-Check voltage reading points. There is also an adjusted cooling bracket included that is intended for use alongside LN2 pots in order to draw heat away from the MOSFETs.
This is an attractively designed card, and we can see the ‘OC' lettering in yellow which surround the first and third fan. If it wasn't for the box pointing this out specifically I would have missed it.
The triple fans are graded as ‘Torx' fans which are said to produce high levels of airflow while maintaining low noise levels. The card dimensions are L=330mm, W=140mm, H=53mm.
The card is 2.5 slots thick and is equipped with a high grade, branded backplate. A backplate is a great inclusion, although it is somewhat expected on such a high end board. It will not only protect sensitive components, but lower the temperatures of PCB hotspots.
Quite surprising to see a *warranty void if removed sticker on one of the screws – especially as this GPU is clearly supporting LN2 overclocking. This seems to be a policy of MSI in general, as they also apply these stickers to the screws on their laptop computers. After speaking with their team, they will honour the warranty if problems would occur. Well As long as the user hasn't been hamfisted with the product and caused the problems himself.
This card is equipped with two 8 pin power connectors and a single 6 pin power connector as well. MSI are trying to ensure the PCB can get plenty of power, especially if you plan on overclocking with Liquid Nitrogen. It is not surprisingly, fully SLi capable in multiple card configurations.
The Lightning is equipped with a DVI port, a full sized HDMI 2.0 port (supporting 60hz at Ultra HD 4k), and three full sized DisplayPort connectors.If you wish, you can use all these ports at the same time for triple monitor gaming.
Above, the photos show the PCB with the cooler and backplate removed.
Surprisingly, the backplate doesn't make contact so is useful only for convective and radiative cooling. Direct contact would seem like a wise choice on this card.
The card uses a 12+3 phase power delivery system. GPU operation is handled by twelve phases which consists of twelve chokes, 24 470 microfarad flad capacitors, and twelve of International Rectifiers' IR3555M 60A MOSFET solutions. Memory power is handled by three phases but the MOSFETs are changed to a toal of six (for three phases) hi- and low-side units.
Control is handled by International Rectifiers' IR3595A, IR3570A, IR3897, and six IR3599 phase doublers for the GPU core power delivery section.
Above, we can see the V-Check points (as well as fan headers) and dual BIOS switch.
We have reviewed many GTX980 Ti's this year – as we know the core is built on the 28nm process. It is equipped with 96 ROPS, 176 texture units and 2816 CUDA Cores. The 6GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1,774 mhz (7.1Gbps effective) and is connected via a 384 bit interface.
The core on the Lightning card is overclocked to 1,203mhz with a boost speed set at 1,303mhz, although the typical recorded GPU clock during gaming is 1418MHz.
You would think that this GPU would perform better than the rest on the market, but my Asus GTX980-Ti-OC-STRIX-6GB perform even under Air much better than the Lightning.
Hey, what boost clock does this card have without overclocking?
did it not win an award from you?
Sorry I’m dumb. So it does 🙂