MSI R7970 Lightning Pro Reviews

One of the coolest things about this video card is the support for Eyefinity 6, or running 6 displays off of one video card. This video card can offer an experience in gaming that is even greater than a reference Radeon HD 7970. The down side to this video card's output options is the fact that it uses two single-link DVI adaptors which only carry a maximum resolution of 1920x1200. This video card is clearly built with DisplayPort users in mind. In that scenario, there is no problem running at 2560x1600 or plugging in multiple displays for Eyefinity. The MSI R7970 Lightning is the current flagship video card for MSI. It features the newest version of the Twin Frozr cooling system and it has the highest out-of-box overclock in the Radeon HD 7970 market we have experienced. The MSI R7970 Lightning was launched on March 16th, 2012, so it is relatively new to the market. It may not be readily available for another week or two. MSI says that the MSRP of the video card is $599.99 which makes it one of the most expensive Radeon HD 7970 cards available. The only competition that the MSI R7970 had was against a stock, reference AMD Radeon HD 7970. We did see the MSI R7970 out-of-box and overclocked beat the reference design. The out-of-box clocks were about 11% faster in all of our games, while the overclocked Lightning was around 20% faster. We were somewhat let down with our overclocking results, but perhaps its just the luck of the draw.

MSI's Radeon HD 7970 Lightning is a beautfully engineered custom implementation of the AMD HD 7970. It shows what can be achieved when focusing on pure performance and overclocking potential. Thanks to the increased clock speeds out of the box the HD 7970 Lightning sees an 8% performance lead over the reference HD 7970. Unfortunately this is still not enough to fight off NVIDIA's GTX 680 which offers the same performance up to 1920x1200. At 2560x1600 NVIDIA's GTX 680 is weaker, which is caused by NVIDIA's card being slower at that resolution, not by the Lightning being faster. Also you have to consider that the GTX 680 is just the basic reference design, not a specially crafted high performance version. This review introduces multi-monitor testing at 5760x1080, here the HD 7970 Lightning makes short shrift of the GTX 680 thanks to AMD's flawless Eyefinity implementation. NVIDIA's Surround failed in many of our games and delivers lower performance in most of the cases where it works. Unfortunately not everything is gold with the MSI HD 7970 Lightning. Boosting the card's performance resulted in massively increased power consumption, which generates heat that has to go somewhere. In games the cooler has to work extra hard, resulting in excessive fan noise, making it one of the noisiest cards I ever reviewed.

The HD 7970 may be having a hard time standing out against a GTX 680 card that has it outgunned and out priced but this architecture still has plenty of life left in it. Regardless of the adversity placed in their paths, AMD’s board partners have continued to innovate and there’s no better example of this march towards perfection than MSI’s HD 7970 Lightning. While it may cost a small fortune, MSI has designed this card in such a way that could take some of the shine away from NVIDIA’s dominating but unavailable GTX 680. The overclocked core and memory frequencies allow it to match or beat a reference GTX 680 in nearly every benchmark but this card really stretches its legs in multi monitor situations. Before the HD 7970, running games at playable framerates across multiple screens typically required two GPUs working together. That all changed a few months ago and the Lightning takes extreme resolution gaming to the next level.

The MSI R7970 Lighting is a well designed video card that is faster than any other Radeon HD 7970 out of the box and it still has a ton of overclocking headroom left in it!

I really became impressed by MSI video cards when the Super-Pipe GTX 285 was released all those years ago. Last year’s batch of Lightning cards impressed me even more. I was waiting to be blown away by this year’s example. Perhaps I was expecting too much? The card is not a bad card by any stretch of the imagination. The stock/normal clock is 1070/1400, which is much higher than the reference design. It is faster still than many of the other overclocked versions out there, most of which only go to 1 GHz. So off of the bat the card is going to be faster than any other air cooled HD 7970 out there.