MSI GeForce GTX 480 Lightning review - Product Gallery GeForce GTX 480

Product Gallery GeForce GTX 480

Right, as always ... the box and packaging; so you know what to look for in the stores. The card is well packaged but does not come with a lot of extra's though. For 549 USD / 475 EUR you receive the basics like graphics card, PEG converter cables, manual and a Afterburner and driver CD. We do like the inclusion of a proper HDMI cable.

Overall, it's a nice and dark looking card with a PCB color black. But let's look at the card from several different viewpoints; the GTX 480 card is quite good looking with the black colored and gold plated monitor connectors and then that massive cooler. And it's heavy ..  very heavy alright. I'm not sure how much I like the red colors inserts on the top of the cooler though, completely black might have looked nicer.

The GeForce GTX 480 comes with a heap of memory, 1536 MB to be precise. And that should be enough alright. The reference cards are clocked at a 700 MHz core frequency, 1400 MHz on the shader processors and the gDDR5 memory runs at an effective ~3700 MHz.

The MSI Lightning edition however comes factory over-clocked at 750 MHz on the core, 1500 on the shader processors and its memory is bumped towards 4000 MHz (effective). And that does make a nice difference alright. NVIDIA Fermi based cards scale really well when overlocked.