Due to some shipping issues our sample of the MSI Radeon HD 7970 Lightning had been delayed. The card finally arrived though and I wanted to share some photo's with you beforehand. It is a gorgeous card to see and use alright.

The Tahiti-based R7970 Lightning graphics card uses a big PCB, 17-phase digital power, a Twin Frozr IV dual-fan heatsink, and something new called a GPU Reactor. We'll explain that in our full review of course.

The Reactor Core in short is an add-on that has several  tantalum capacitors. Next to the capacitors, there are blue LEDs and a round window that seems to lit up. It should help with overclocking. The card is clocked at a default to 1,070mhz on the core for you.

Anyhow, here are some photo's, click the thumbnail. A full and deep review will follow shortly.