MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Lightning Review - Introduction

DANGER: Thunder clouds above Guru3D - Lightning inbound!
MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Lightning edition gets tested

In this article we test and benchmark one of the most anticipated GeForce GTX 980 Ti cards of the year the Lightning edition graphics card. This GeForce GTX 980 Ti based product comes factory overclocked and sports some seriously cool cooling. Armed with 6 GB graphics memory this product is bound to impress. Thunderclouds hover above the Guru3D test-lab as the MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Lightning edition will now get a review. 

The GPU that resides on under the hood is the big Maxwell, and oh man it's a freak of nature with that kind of game rendering powah! You'd expect a product with '980' in it to have a similar slightly tweaked GPU, but no Sir. Nvidia shifted a thing or two around, the 980 Ti is based on the BIG Maxwell GPU, the same GPU that is powering the Titan X. Obviously the product has been trimmed down a tiny bit, but trust us when we say, there's plenty performance to be found. This product comes with a luxurious six Gigabytes of graphics memory and with these specs, the GTX 980 Ti should be fetching a lot of interest for the true gamers among us. The GPU empowering the GeForce 980 Ti is big, this one has a massive transistor count; it is a slightly revised GM200 A1 GPU that currently feeds the Titan X its horsepower. So yes, a slightly different iteration of the GM200. The card has five display outputs: three DisplayPorts, HDMI and DVI-I.  Where the GTX 980 has 4 GB, this product has a nice 6 GB frame buffer, and close to a third more shader processors when compared to the GeForce 980, accumulating up-to 2816 of them playing the binary game in a GPU that has a whopping 8 Billion transistors (GeForce GTX 980 has 5 Billion). The card looks pretty identical to previous models with subtle changes here and there and with that familiar cooler shroud. Memory wise NVIDIA equipped its GeForce GTX 980 Ti with 7 Gbps memory, the fastest GDDR5 memory you can find on a graphics card today, that's until HBM (stacked memory) is released by the competition in the near future. Combined with GPU Boost 2.0 you will see this product is advertised in the 1076 MHz range on its dynamic clock for the reference products. The reference base clock for 980 Ti is 1 GHz. It's not that the card can't go any higher, but it is done to keep the product in line power consumption wise. With a 250W TDP, we are not complaining at all, no Sir. For the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, monitor outputs include DVI, HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort, this will vary a little with board partner products that are bound to get released after Computex, based on their own design and cooling. With a card like the GeForce GTX 980 Ti you will be able to play the hottest games including the Witcher 3 and Grand Theft Auto V at that whopping Ultra HD 8.2 Mpixels at a 3840x2160 resolution with a single card, in fact we are going to check that out in this review. The maximum allowed board design power draw is roughly 250 Watts, not bad considering the caliber of this product. The MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Lightning edition comes with a massive whopper of a factory overclock combined with huge cooling capacity that, if I may say so, remains totally silent. The GM-200-310 GPU based graphics card now comes with a custom PWM design, 12 GPU phases and another three memory power phases all plastered into a 10 layer PCB.

The MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Lightning comes with what is called a 3X3 overclock design, you can regulate a threefold of voltages as in the GPU, Auxilary (PLL) and memory voltage. We got the Hynix based memory on this card running at almost 8700 Mhz for example (effective data-rate). Obviously there is a dual-BIOS present as well. One for the regular folks like me, but if you place the BIOS into LN2 mode, all bets are on. You'll retrieve 1.3 Volts to play with on the GPU voltage range with AfterBurner for example. This 6 GB card is overclocked for you at default already, typically a reference GTX 980 Ti will run 1 GHz. The Lightning however comes with default clocks of 1304 MHz on the boost clock ! The GDDR5 memory partition as well is seeing a small speed-bump over the reference 7 Gbps, now at 7.1 Gbps. Have a peek at the product we test today and then head on-wards into the review.

MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti  Lightning