MSI R5870 Lightning review - Introduction

MSI R5870 Lightning - injecting steroids into a graphics card

One of the products I personally have been looking forward to reviewing very much is the one we are testing today. Yes, it could very well be the most sought after Radeon 5870 on the market, the high-end and enthusiast class MSI R5870 Lightning. MSI labels it under their military class products, as the quality and choice in components is equal to military standards. This definitely is the stuff you guys, our wise Guru3D.com audience likes to read up on.

The MSI R5870 Lightning is from ground up a custom board design. I mean literally; the only thing original on that graphics card is the GPU from ATI and even on the GPU MSI tries to tweak a little. Custom PCB, specific component usage, a bucket load of VRM phases (15 phases) and Twin Frozr II cooler. This Mc Daddy of graphics cards should be ready for some good overclocks. In fact I have seen some reports of end-users applying Liquid Nitrogen cooling on this card and they reached in fact reached 1.4 GHz quite easily. But let me not sidetrack.

The MSI HD 5870 Lightning can be best described the uber-daddy of graphics cards with features like a custom PCB --  bigger than the reference cards, a 12-phase vGPU and a 3-phase vMEM. Use of high-C surface-mount capacitors and customized cooling.  What will also be of interest are V-Check points that allow you to check GPU and memory voltage, and a series of twelve LEDs on the rear of the card showing active vGPU power phases. But this is just the introduction of course, we'll tell all the specifics on the next few pages.

See, we'd almost forgotten that this is obviously a regular 5870 as well and thus comes DX11 ready and can take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions.  Another big feature of the product that you already learned about is of course Eyefinity, the ability to connect one to up-to six monitors (depending on AIC/AIB choices in outputs) to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredible wide monitor resolution to play games in. ATI has changed the rules as the Radeon HD 5870 has 1600 stream processors (shader processors). ATI literally doubled up everything inside that GPU and as such we spot a GPU die with 2.15 billion transistors. That's 2150 million transistors you guys. In comparison, the Radeon HD 4890 has 956 million.

Yeah, this is pure Guru3D reader stuff, it's these products that make us chuckle and our eyes bigger. Let's just head on over to the next page and review MSI's R5870 Lightning shall we ? But have a peek first ...