MSI R6970 Lightning Pro Reviews

The MSI R6970 Lightning easily earns our HardOCP Editor's Choice Gold Award for exceptional quality, exceptional feature set and exceptional performance.

The card was a joy to work with. It is a tremendous design from MSI, and I am happy to say that they have erased the memory of the disappointing R5870 of yesteryear. It does have a price premium over a standard HD 6970, but in this case I think the premium is well worth it. It has a good overclock right out of the box, and the Twin Frozr III cooler is a marvel. Even though it does not exhaust the air outside of the case, it was so effective in cooling the chip that it barely raised the case temperature in the first place. MSI has created a gem of a card. Encore, encore!

Out of the box, the performance of the new R6970 Lightning was pretty disappointing. It started brightly on the two synthetic benchmarks, 3DMark11 and 3DMark Vantage, posting gains of around 5%, but real world applications such as Crysis and Battlefield Bad Company 2, the difference in performance is negligible. Overclocking performance is certainly admirable for a Radeon HD 6970 card. Using MSI Afterburner, we boosted the voltages and managed to run the card stably at 1000MHz at the core and 5600MHz DDR at the memory. These clock speeds gave the R6970 Lightning a more appreciable edge over reference cards, boosting performance in real world applications by around 5%.

MSI's Radeon HD 6970 Lightning is a pimped up version of the original AMD HD 6970 reference design. Not much is left as in the original: PCB layout, cooling, clock frequencies, all have been improved upon. As a result the HD 6970 Lightning is one of the few premium HD 6970 designs on the market. The card offers plenty of features for overclockers, for example voltage measurement points, triple voltage control using MSI Afterburner, DIP switches for enthusiast tweaking and dual BIOS. In terms of performance, MSI is using increased clocks of 940 MHz core and 1375 MHz memory which are among the highest available on any HD 6970 version. As a result the card gains about 7% in performance when compared to the unoverclocked reference design. However, this is not enough to surpass NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 570 which is a few percent faster and less expensive. Other competition for the card exists as the Radeon HD 6950, which lets willing users unlock its disabled shaders which result in the same performance as a normal HD 6970 - at lower cost.