MSI GTX 780 Lightning 3GB Graphics Card Review




/ 10 years ago

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A Closer Look


The graphics card itself is quite a substantial piece of engineering featuring two black 90mm fans and a yellow 80mm fan on top of a super-dense aluminium heatsink with seven 8mm heat pipes.

MSI GTX 780 Lighting (7)

The back has a nearly full-cover backplate to help keep the PCB temperature down. Interestingly the two columns of small metal contacts about 2 inches in from the left are LED strips that change depending on the GPU load amount. The colour of the LEDs is strangely blue not yellow.

MSI GTX 780 Lighting (10)

You can also see MSI’s GPU reactor case that houses additional power components to keep the GPU core stable under overclocked load.

MSI GTX 780 Lighting (12)

The card is verging onto a full triple slot in width. The reality is it takes up two slots but if you combine the overhang from the shroud and the GPU reactor it obstructs 4 PCI lanes.

MSI GTX 780 Lighting (6)

Along the top there are two SLI connectors for official 3-Way SLI. With some ghetto-driver mods you can enable 4-Way SLI.

MSI GTX 780 Lighting (15)

Power is drawn in from two 8 pins that sit in a recessed part of the heatsink to enable you to easily remove the power connectors.

MSI GTX 780 Lighting (14)

The bottom is open for ventilation and there is clearly some additional heatsink plates underneath the main heatsink that cool the VRM and memory chips.

MSI GTX 780 Lighting (11)

At the end you can see the three fan PWM connections and the three V-Check point connections.

MSI GTX 780 Lighting (8)

The rear I/O offers dual DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort for 3+1 displays, with up to three in Nvidia Surround with a fourth accessory display.

MSI GTX 780 Lighting (13)

The Lightning writing lights up when the card is on and as far as I can tell changes colour with the temperature of the GPU. You can also see the BIOS switch for switching between the normal and the OC BIOS.

MSI GTX 780 Lighting (16)

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