Introduction

HAWKs, Lightning's, AfterBurner, Kombustor, Predator ... yeah the aeromotive theme of MSI products certainly stands out. And that makes sense, they try to compare and brand their products towards military class FAST (preferably flying) products. And with much success, ever since the last year or two the more high-end and enthusiast gear and sales definitely kicked off for MSI.

Today a perfect example of a review on all of the above, MSI took an Radeon HD 6970 GPU ... and just that. Then they designed a PCB around it, applied eighteen power phases, made a military class selection in components, upgraded the memory, added a lot of extra features, armed it with the new Twin Frozr III cooler and factory overclocked the product for you.

The end result surprised even us, a totally silent high-end product with a lot of overclocking headroom that has the looks to kill and the means to show of some pure muscle power.

Today as such, we'll review the R6970 Lightning, the most high-end, single GPU based product in the enthusiast lightning series. Pre-clocked at 940 MHz, you can actually take the product towards 1 GHz fairly easy with the help from MSI's AfterBurner software that allows the full spectrum of voltage tweaking on GPU and memory. The end result as stated, surprised even us. This is just a really nice card with a lot of features, extras and it just oozes with build quality.

Let's have a peek and then head onwards into the review.