Final words and conclusion
Final words and conclusion
MSI is addressing a very niche market with the Lightning edition of the GeForce GTX 480. Like any card in their HAWK and Lightning range, everything is customized or changed, the PCB, the component selection, the cooling, the BIOS factory clock frequencies, the voltages, the overclockability. The end result is a really nice product that definitely manages to impress at many levels. It's something completely different from what we are used to, and that alone is already remarkable, commendable and impressive.
The one level it does not impress at however is the price, see the competition, AMD/ATI over the past two years has been pushing hard to be competitive with a lot of success. Bang for buck is what they are so strong at and as such that makes this card so hard to justify, especially the average and enthusiast end-users merely gain from a 10 maybe 15% performance increase with the overclock while paying a big price premium. Also and we just have to be absolutely clear here, overclocking wise we definitely expected more from this product and it's cooling solution. Meanwhile the product is priced at a fairly steep 550 USD, which is roughly 475 EUR.
Now that said, this is the extreme high-end market though. These board are developed 100% custom for you guys, with a relatively small volume. As such yeah, they are simply expensive to make. But here's the good stuff, the lightning edition with its default factory overclock offers a nice bump in performance compared to the reference product. But the assessment and focus here is the simple fact that the cooler is just so much better than the reference cooler from NVIDIA.
The noise levels at defaults are more than fine, it results in airflow that you can hear, not even slightly annoying or anything, no Sir. The cooling performance is impressive. Temperatures under full load returned roughly 73 Degrees C maximum, and that's just great for a graphics card that in its reference design pushes 90 Degrees C.
Overclocking wise we did expect to take the product a notch higher with the cooler left at default, we foresee that roughly 850 MHz with the current TwinFroz III cooling solution will roughly be your limit with the memory at 4250~4500 MHz.
To achieve over 900~950 MHz on the core, you will need to force the cooler RPM level to 100%, which makes it very loud. Anyway, overall it will get you another 10 maybe 15% more performance on top of a product that is already really fast.
Any game to date will play fine in the highest resolutions with at least 4x Antialising enabled and the very best image quality settings. So performance is just not an issue. Come to think of it, we do still wonder though why NVIDIA still has not released the full 512SP version of the GPU. As I like to say, you either have to be first, best, or different to be able to make a difference. A proper custom cooled GeForce GTX 480 has been long overdue, there have been some others recently, but now MSI as well is attacking that segment with much success.
The product is totally unique and catered to the true overclockers that likes to give it a little LN2 coolin lovin, in fact the PCb was designed in such a way that you can easily mount LN2 pots onto it, and so on. It's exactly that segment where the extra's come into play, like multi-meter voltage monitor points, the micro switches for voltages, cold bug features, Dual-BIOS and so on. The rest of us 'regulars' will have to do with the improved TwinFrozr III cooler with its nice inaudible design.
There's a lot of TLC to be found in a product like this, just fool around a little with MSI AfterBurner and seek your threshold. Make no mistake, this product will be expensive and whether or not that's worth it to you, well ... I'll leave that up to you to decide. Other then that, the product itself is grade-A and top notch, well done MSI, we like to see such irregular and unique designs so very very much. It certainly makes my heart beat faster.
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