Product Showcase
Nice to see is that the product has a back-plate, the bad news is that it is almost completely closed. Albeit the backplate is like 2mm away from the PCB, this design is going to trap heat at some level. We are at a bit of a loss as to why MSI has chosen this closed backplate design as this is not what overclockers, tweakers and aficionados like to see.
There is sufficient monitor connectivity available, all gold plated as well. You'll get three full size Display Port connectors, one full size HDMI 2.0 compatible connector and one DVI connector. HDMI is 2.0 compatible meaning that compatible monitors and tellys can do UHD at 60 Hz, DP is 1.2 but has support for eDP 1.4. To the top left there still is a ventilation exhaust.
Okay, this is a bit overkill if you are not an LN2 overclocker, but you will need to connect two full 8 pin PCI-Express graphics power headers and then a 6-pin connector as well. All connectors will need to be connected, so this is mandatory so just using say the two 8-pin headers is a no-go. But that should allow you to get a little more amperage into the card for hopefully an improved tweaking experience.
The lightning of course comes with V-Check points for direct and accurate read-out of GPU, Memory and PLL voltage. Basically you connected the supplied wires to the card and a digital multimeter (DMM), and you can read out the voltage values of PLL, Memory and GPU.
It is a rather big card alright, bloke stuff, made for true men - looks great though doesn't it ?