Introduction

Last year AMD released their new Radeon HD 5800 Series of graphics cards which quickly became a big success due to the numerous improvements made over previous generations. Up to now all cards available from all manufacturers were reference design cards which means they were all made to the same specifications, using the same components and then a sticker was added on the cooler depending on the AIB.

MSI's latest member to the Lightning Series comes with a completely redesigned PCB and uses their famous TwinFrozr cooler. It also uses an increased amount of PWM phases and two 8-pin PCIe power connectors to promise more overclocking potential.

MSI has slightly increased the clock speeds on their design to 900/1200 up from 850/1200 on the reference design.

	Radeon HD 4870 X2	GeForce GTX 285	Radeon HD 5850	Radeon HD 5870	MSI HD 5870 Lightning	GeForce GTX 295
Shader units	2x 800	240	1440	1600	1600	2x 240
ROPs	2x 16	32	32	32	32	2x 28
GPU	2x RV770	GT200b	Cypress	Cypress	Cypress	2x GT200b
Transistors	2x 956M	1400M	2154M	2154M	2154M	2x 1400M
Memory Size	2x 1024 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB	1024 MB	2x 896 MB
Memory Bus Width	2x 256 bit	512 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	2x 448 bit
Core Clock	750 MHz	648 MHz	725 MHz	850 MHz	900 MHz	576 MHz
Memory Clock	900 MHz	1242 MHz	1000 MHz	1200 MHz	1200 MHz	999 MHz
Price	$350	$350	$310	$400	$430	$520