MSI GTX 680 Lightning 2GB Graphics Card Review

Grabbing the card out of the packaging, we can see a very nice looking card indeed with a large Twin Frozr IV cooler that sits over the whole PCB. Due to the card being part of the Lightning series, we find a black cooler with a yellow strip.

The cooler incorporates a twin fan design with two 10cm PWM fans which sit slightly raised off of the coolers shrouding to give the best airflow and to assist in the dust removal technology.

The bottom of the card reveals with large heatpipe design that the aluminium heatsink allows to be passed through. These heatpipes span to different areas on the cooler to provide maximum heat dissipation.

We don’t normally take a look at the underside of a card, but it’s certainly a necessity to do so on this particular card. We find a large backplate to give stability to the card and a unique MSI branded plastic moulding which looks very similar to Tony Stark’s Arc Reactor.

Once we remove the plastic MSI branded moulding, we get a first hand look at the GPU Reactor, which is something MSI have been implementing on certain series of cards to give extra overclocking headroom due to the added power delivery from the small device.

The power reactor simply installs by connector it to the main PCB and is also said to removal a lot of power noise to give the cleanest power to the card for the best results, especially when overclocking. For the average user, this feature may be a bit overkill, but for the enthusiast using the V-Check points and extreme cooling, this is certainly a feature worth having.

We find that the typical power connectors have had an upgrade due to the extra power delivery for those wanting it. We now find two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors, and for those who don’t have the relevant connectors, MSI bundle in the included 6-pin to 8-pin adapters.

Moving along the top of the card we can see the three V-Check voltage points for those requiring extra flexibility when looking at overclocking and monitoring.

Carrying on along the top of the card, we find two SLI bridge connectors, allowing for up to four GTX 680 graphics cards in 4-way SLI.

Finally taking a look at the rear I/O on the card, we see a very shiny design with gold connectors. The connectors stay the same however, with a DVI-D and DVI-I connector, HDMI port and full-size DisplayPort. Also being part of the 600 series from Nvidia, we have the ability to enable Nvidia Surround through the use of one card for up to four displays.

Lastly, taking a look at the specifications of the card through GPU-Z we see that compared to a stock GTX 680, the GPU clock speed has been increased from a reference speed of 1006MHz to 1111MHz. The memory speed remained at the stock speed of 1502MHz (6Gbps Effective).

With the GPU clock speed being increased, the boost speed is consequently increased at the same time from 1059MHz to 1176MHz. Taking a look at the other specifications, we can see that they remain the same with a GK104 28nm GPU with 3540 million transistors, with the card incorporating 2GB of GDDR5 memory running on a 256 Bit memory interface. The specifications are nigh on identical to the GTX 680 EX OC that we recently looked at from KFA2.