MSI R7970 Lightning Radeon HD 7970 3GB Video Card Review
Earlier this month MSI launched the companies AMD Radeon HD 7970 based Lightning series video card, the R7970 Lightning. The MSI Lightning series takes highend graphics cards and turns them into monsters with custom PCB designs as well as GPU coolers and then includes topquality components that increase the cards stability and endurance, making it ideal for overclocking purposes. When AMD first released the AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB video card in December 2011 we were impressed with the card with the stock cooler and the 925MHz core and 1375 MHz 5500 MHz effective GDDR5 memory clock speeds. The MSI R7970 Lightning might be three months late to the game, but this card might be worth the wait for AMD fans that didnt want to buy the reference design. The MSI R7970 Lightning is clocked at 1070 MHz on the core and 1400 MHz on the memory 5600 MHz effective. This is an impressive 15.7% clock increase on the core and a mediocre 1.8% on the memory.
Looking at the front of the MSI R7970 Lightning graphics card youll see a video card that looks nothing like the AMD Radeon HD 7970 reference design. MSI engineers came up with their own PCB design and GPU cooling solution for this card, so it has been designed from the ground up to be more robust. MSI has included Military Class III components on it along with the Twin Frozr IV dualfan cooler. On the custom PCB, MSI beefed up the power design to a 14+2+1 Phase PWM solution! With a 17 phase PWM design and a digital PWM controller, the MSI R7970 Lightning can offer more current output to the GPU and memory to ensure. On top of that MSI allows for the voltage adjustment of the GPU, Memory and the PCIe slot with the MSI Afterburner utility. MSI has done a number of things to make this card stand out from the crowd!
the card measures 11inches in length and stands at 4.75inches in It should be
noted that the metal fan shroud extends past the PCB, so the true length of the card is 11.75 in length and the height of the card up to 5 inThe fan blades have air channels located along the the edge of the fan blades that help increase the surface area. MSI says that this adjustment increased airflow by 20% compared to conventional fan. MSI also uses dust removal technology with the Twin Frozr IV, which means that when you turn the system on the fans spin in reverse for 30 seconds to blow the dust out and then return to the regular spinning direction.
If you look closely at the 10cm PWM fan in the image above youll see a small green LED light diode between the fan blades. Each fan has a single blue LED light that is on when the card is running.
The MSI R7970 Lightning has a feature called GPU Reactor, which is located under that blue and silver plastic cap that easily pops off the back of the card. The GPU Reactor is designed to supply extra GPU power for maximum overclocking stability. It also helps to eliminate GPU power noise ripple and already installed when you buy a R7970 Lightning card. The image above shows what the GPU Reactor PCB looks like and as you can see it has eight tantalum capacitors on it with a power feed on the going into the side of the PCB.
If you dont want to use the GPU Reactor you can simply unplug it and not use it. When we first got the MSI R7970 Lightning we thought this was nothing more than a marketing gimmick and something that could have been placed on the PCB rather than a daughter PCB card. We reached out to MSI to get a comment on the GPU Reactor and why it wasnt placed on the PCB to begin with.
The GPU reactor is meant to be an addon board that provides additional power to the GPU for extreme overclocking such as LN2. We could have just added it on the regular PCB, but as you may notice, the PCB is already overcrowded with the existing amount of power phases thrown on. keeping it within a 2slot design. Thus, the decision was made to have it as an addon PCB for LN2 overclocking, and for regular usage especially SLI configurations the user can remove it to prevent the card from taking up 3 slots. I hope this answers your question on that. For regular overclocking on air, the GPU reactor is not needed to achieve maximum OC, but it most certainly does not hurt. MSI USA
As you can see if you only plan on air cooling this is a pointless feature, but would help those that plan on overclocking with subzero cooling methods like LN2. We measured and found that MSI is using standard 53mm mounting
holes, so if you plan on changing the GPU cooler or adding a water block
at a later date you can easily do so and this is the dimension you need to beAlong the top edge of the MSI R7970 Lightning youll find three voltage check points that you can plug your volt meter directly into to get accurate readings. From left to right you have the VGPU, VMEM and VVDDCI check points. You can adjust the GPU, Memory and VDDCI voltage settings in afterburner and then check the readings here without having to do any hard mods on the PCB itself! The MSI Afterburner utility also shows the temperature of the GPU, Memory and VRM MOSFET in the utility.
When it comes to video outputs the MSI R7970 Lightning has four gold colored miniDisplayPort connectors, a singlelink DVII and a singlelink DVID outputs. All AMD Radeon HD 7970 cards support up to six DisplayPort displays and this card is no exception. When we plugged our Dell 30inch monitor in by using one of the DVI ports we quickly remembered that neither are duallink and they wont run at 2560x1600 due to obvious limitations. If you have a DualLink DVI monitor that only offers DualLink DVI, youre going to need an Active DisplayPort to DualLink DVI connector. MSI does include a miniDisplayPort to HDMI adapter with the card, so that will keep most people from having to buy adapters.
Since the MSI R7970 Lightning is a tad bit different from your ordinary AMD Radeon HD 7970 reference design card, it needs a little more power. MSI has fitted the R7970 Lighting with two 8pin power connectors. MSI says that the R7970 Lighting requires a 6500W or greater power supply with two 150W 8pin PCIe connectors. With 300 Watts of power coming though the 8pin connectors and 75 Watts through the PCI Express x16 slot, this means this card has a total of 375 Watts that it can bring it when needed! Good think MSI is using their Military Class III components CopperMOS, HiC capacitors, golden solid state chokes and dark solid capacitors as they might be needed after this card is punished with some extreme overclocks.
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