MSI R5870 Lightning review

Graphics cards 1048 Page 5 of 25 Published by

teaser

 

 

MSI R5870 Lightning

The Radeon HD 5000 series will obviously also be CrossfireX compatible, you could hook up one or even two more of these cards and go really nuts. Typically we however do recommend you to not use more than two GPUs, as drivers wise you'll quickly run into problems, let alone performance scaling becomes very inefficient. To your upper right you can see the two Crossfire connectors.

Also this photo shows the custom PCB design really well. What catches the eye is that the PCB has become a little taller.

MSI R5870 Lightning

Two 8-pin PEG connector. Now these are recommended, not mandatory. You'll receive two 6 to 8-pin PEG converters should you only have one or two 6-pin connector headers from your PSU. But if you wanted to do an overclocking session with say Liquid Nitrogen, that's where the two 8-pin PEGs come in handy.

So again, you can use your 6-pin PEG connectors, which are sufficient, but for massive overclocking native 8-pin connectors with a lot of AMPs are recommended.

MSI R5870 Lightning

Connectivity. It is good to see how much connectivity this card can deal with. With the Radeon HD 570 series Lightning cards we have four digital connectors at our disposal -- we spot two dual-link DVI, a HDMI and a DisplayPort connector, all gold plated. If you'd like to go 3x 2560x1600 with Eyefinity then that is not an issue.

MSI R5870 Lightning

Here we have flipped the card around and look at the bottom side. Let's zoom in a little. So the cooler is based of four heatpipes each leading to the GPU cooling block. The pipes are nice and thick, 8mm.

MSI R5870 Lightning

Once we zoom in up-close next to the crossfire connector we see a small jumper pin like connector. At several monitor points on the PCB we have voltage monitor points. Now look at the next photo.

Share this content
Twitter Facebook Reddit WhatsApp Email Print