MSI GeForce GTX 580 Lightning review - Final words and verdict

Final words and verdict

The introduction already hinted to the fact that we like the GTX 580 Lightning, and trust us ... it's very likable.

To date this is the fastest GTX 580 we've had in our hands and in fact this is the fastest single GPU graphics card to date. Now we tried to nitpick and look for small subtleties that could be better but quite honestly, there isn't anything we came up with as all negative variables on this product seem to be rules out..

Starting with noise and cooling, the Twin Frozr III cooler does it's work really well. You can slightly hear it with the default factory clocks but really, that's all. The temperatures of this pre-overclocked product remain striking low and the sheer looks of the cooler are just dazzling.

The card comes factory overclocked for you, where a regular GTX 580 has a 772 MHz base frequency and 1000 MHz (4000 effective) on the memory, MSI brings that number up-to 832 MHz on the base clock and 4200 MHz on the memory (effective data-rate).

Since the GeForce cards are really sensitive in performance when you overclock them you'll immediately notice a performance increase over the reference product, and that's very nice to see as it's rewarding to tweak these values a little more.

Once you start to manually overclock you can get close to 900 MHz, but it would be a shame to not voltage tweak at the very least the GPU. Grab AfterBurner, set your voltage at 1.2V and you can take the GPU into sixth gear, we actually ended at a lovely 950 MHz on that graphics core and would we have taken some more time and fiddle  around with the cooler RPM, then that 1 GHz might be a barrier you could reach, though after 950 MHz things will get increasingly difficult plus your noise levels would go up quite a bit.

But yeah that's the fun factor, the card allows you to do that stuff without too much risk. Heck the military class components and rigid VRM design makes the product go where other can't.

As mentioned in the review, there's a second BIOS as well, screw up the first with an OC firmware tweak, then you can revert to the default BIOS, and reflash the corrupted firmware. A nice fail-safe. Also there are small micro buttons to be found on the card, but leave them alone we say, unless you are planning to break records with liquid nitrogen or other exotic cooling.

Well there you have it, the year is still young but MSI's GeForce GTX 580 Lightning might be the graphics card of the year. The design is absolutely amazing, the features grand, the component selection amazing and the potential even better. As such we can't do anything else other then granting it our best hardware award. The quality and sophisticated level of design is something that appeals to us incredible much.

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