MSI N480GTX Lightning Pro Reviews

The MSI N480GTX Lightning and Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 SOC both performed very well throughout testing. Both of the cards were measurably faster than a reference GeForce GTX 480, as expected. Overall, the Gigabyte card proved to be faster than MSI’s offering due to the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 SOC’s higher GPU core and shader clocks, but the MSI card’s faster memory gave it an edge in AvP. In light of NVIDIA’s recent GPU releases, both of these cards slightly trail the GTX 580, but typically run on par with or slightly better than a GTX 570.

The MSI N480GTX Lightning is a customized take upon the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480. While already known to be powerful out of the box, this card adds some more to the party. The additions include a better cooling design, a factory overclock for more performance out of the box, and the provision for other tweaks that allow enthusiasts to further overclock it and extract every last ounce of performance. Of course, this does exact its pound of flesh in pricing but it is smooth going after that.

With its LN2 features, the MSI N480GTX Lightning is a great video card for those interested in truly extreme overclocking. For the rest of us, however, its effectiveness is somewhat limited by that fact that if you aren’t going to be breaking records with liquid nitrogen, it is a pretty average factory overclocked GeForce GTX 480 with an above average price.

MSI as always has done a good job with the Lightning version of the card and as we mentioned, it’s not going to be for everyone including the light hearted and the light walleted (is that a word?!? lol), but if you’re looking for some serious power from a single video card, this is one you’ve got to look at.

MSI's GeForce GTX 480 Lightning delivers the most complete feature set targeted at overclockers available today. The card offers software voltage control for up to three voltages, combined with MSI's Afterburner overclocking tool, this makes overclocking easier than before. Also, the inclusion of voltage measurement points and a dual BIOS which comes preloaded with a configuration optimized for liquid nitrogen use is testament to MSI's focus on overclocking with this card. In our testing we saw decent overclocking potential on air, which is clearly better than what the NVIDIA reference design could do. With added voltage this can be expanded a bit more. Personally I think MSI's out of the box clocks of 750 / 1000 MHz seem a bit low for what the card can do, almost forcing users to do overclocking themselves, to maximize their investment.