Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

It is really hard to not like a Lightning product from MSI. Their applied concept is extremely well though through and the products serve the hardware enthusiast up-to the professional overclockers. Now where NVIDIA places more and more restriction on overclocking, there seems to be more headroom left with AMD products. And that makes the Lightning editions very interesting on the AMD Radeon platform as basically you purchase a factory overclocked product, but then have much more freedom to tweak you product even further, and it is precisely that excitement that makes product like shown in tyhis review a lot of fun - opposed to NVIDIA who will pretty much precisely decide where your tweak can end.

Cooling & Noise Levels

So if we think back and picture the the reference cooled 290X products, then we can only conclude that they show pretty average to poor temperatures at 95 Degrees C under load. MSI addressed that as the TriFrozr cooler makes a very significant difference at 65 Degrees C under load, the cooler looks and cools just great in a proper symbiosis of relatively low noise versus very acceptable temperatures. And if you want a little more cooling performance, just grab AfterBurner and make / match a fan profile to your needs.

The card produces really interesting thermal imaging results, out of all 290X cards tested the card never goes into the danger zone. The PCB with its impressive VRM design is completely customized and you will only see MSI's components based on their 'Military class', which is lovely as it truly is a product that was designed to last. The fans remain silent fans and in an all black yellow theme it make this a good looking package alright.

Aesthetics

Looks are very important these days, and a previous Lightning review has shown that not everybody likes the TriFrozr cooler based on sheer aesthetics. Armed with that Trifrozr cooler the black design card I think it looks pretty terrific. But taste is such a subjective thing. But we do understand that a three fan cooler is not everybody's cup of tea. As stated in the previous chapter, the cooler in its all black design on a dark PCB with the three subtle and silent fans combined with a hint of yellow makes this a good looking package alright. Great looking and very sturdy I must state as well. There is a metal plate at the top and backside of the card so the card can not bend when seated horizontally in the PC. Now imagine the 29X Lightning paired with something like shown below ...

Yes, if you wonder why MSI uses a black and yellow design, obviously they would love it if you pair the product with an MPower or XPower motherboard.

Power Consumption

Power consumption is OK, the card is rated by us having a 275 Watt TDP. That is high but could have been worse, it is the nature of high-end gaming. I think enthusiast consumers at this performance level will not mind that much about the power draw and be forgiving. That TDP also will make running multi-GPU solutions a bit more complicated. With two card we think an 800~900 Watt PSU would be sufficient. So yeah, it's not great to have a GPU consuming that much power, but it could have been a lot worse.

Game Performance

Any AMD R9 290X in most scenarios will be performing roughly at Titan or GeForce GTX 780 Ti like performance, that it pretty kick ass for just one GPU with a nicer price-tag. Performance wise really there's not one game that won't run seriously good at either of the cards, and that is at the very best image quality settings. And you do it all with a nice 30" monitor of course, at 2560x1440/1600. I mean BioShock infinite at Ultra quality levels is still oozing out 60+ FPS there. Or what about Hitman Absolution with 67+ FPS at 2560x1600 High quality and 2xMSAA?  It's really nice performance. And especially for those with Ultra High Definition gaming in mind, the 290/290X will make sense setup in Crossfire. That would be a sweet spot and you'd have 4 GB of graphics memory per GPU.

Overclocking

Overclocking then. The card already is factory overclocked for you by a decent margin, the reference GPU core clock is 1000 MHz on the reference cards, MSI already runs it at 1080 MHz for you. There obviously is room for more tweaking. On air cooling anything passing 1210 MHz resulted into issues with whatever voltage or other settings we tried. Now it's not bad at all, I mean the card is already factory overclocked for you and you get to add a little extra, but sure, it's not heaps alright. You can reach roughly 1150~1200 MHz on the GPU stable. The memory can be clocked to almost 6500 MHz (effective). Overall that brings the card another 5 maybe 10% performance when compared to reference clock frequencies.

Concluding

You can complain very little when you have a Lightning product in your PC. These products are the best that MSI has to offer in the graphics cards segment. In return you get a breathtaking design, silent modus operandus, a factory overclock and a little extra TLC for the tweaking aficionados amongst us. The complete package as such is just terrific, you'd almost forget is is designed to play games on :)

The Lightning is a beast, capable of serving the guys and girls that want sheer performance and a cool looking card right out of the box, or it can serve the enthusiast end-user just as well as this product was made and designed to break barriers. The Lightning is an extremely sturdy build with merely the best components quality, it's darn fast in performance as it comes close / or even passes a 780 Ti. Butter smooth fluid framerates is what you'll play your games with while hardly making any noise and very low stress temperatures. We can only conclude that the MSI R9-290X Lightning is a job well done from MSI as it is a very teasing and very high performance product, with its lovely 4GB graphics memory and raw rendering performance it will surely offer you an extensive amount of gaming performance into your PC. We award the MSI R9-290X Lightning with our prestigious Guru3D Top Pick award, this is a graphics card the way it should be designed for the high-end and enthusiast consumers.

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