Introduction
AMD's Radeon HD 6970 has been on the market for quite a while now. Recently we have seen an influx of new custom designs from many AIBs that build on the foundation laid out by the HD 6970 reference version but improve on points like overclocking, features or cooling.
MSI's Radeon HD 6970 Lightning is the company's flagship HD 6970 designed with gamers and overclockers in mind. Being offered at $370, the MSI HD 6970 Lightning is only marginally more expensive than the reference design which will help to make it attractive to buyers who would usually go with a cheap reference design.
| Radeon HD 6870 | Radeon HD 5870 | Radeon HD 6950 | GeForce GTX 570 | GeForce GTX 480 | Radeon HD 6970 | MSI HD 6970 Lightning | GeForce GTX 580 | Radeon HD 5970 |
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Shader units | 1120 | 1600 | 1408 | 480 | 480 | 1536 | 1536 | 512 | 2x 1600 |
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ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 | 40 | 48 | 32 | 32 | 48 | 2x 32 |
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GPU | Barts | Cypress | Cayman | GF110 | GF100 | Cayman | Cayman | GF110 | 2x Cypress |
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Transistors | 1700M | 2154M | 2640M | 3000M | 3200M | 2640M | 2640M | 3000M | 2x 2154M |
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Memory Size | 1024 MB | 1024 MB | 2048 MB | 1280 MB | 1536 MB | 2048 MB | 2048 MB | 1536 MB | 2x 1024 MB |
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Memory Bus Width | 256 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 320 bit | 384 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 384 bit | 2x 256 bit |
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Core Clock | 900 MHz | 850 MHz | 800 MHz | 732 MHz | 700 MHz | 880 MHz | 940 MHz | 772 MHz | 725 MHz |
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Memory Clock | 1050 MHz | 1200 MHz | 1250 MHz | 950 MHz | 924 MHz | 1375 MHz | 1375 MHz | 1002 MHz | 1000 MHz |
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Price | $220 | $270 | $290 | $350 | $400 | $360 | $370 | $500 | $580 |
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Packaging
Contents
You will receive:
- Graphics card
- Driver CD + Documentation
- 2x PCI-Express Power Cable
- DVI to Analog VGA Adapter
- Long CrossFire Bridge
- Mini-DisplayPort to DP adapter cable
- 3x Voltage Measurement Cable
The Card
MSI's GeForce GTX 580 Lightning uses an upscaled version of the Twin Frozr III cooler that we have seen on other MSI cards before. As you can see on the second picture, the "lip" of the cooler extends a bit further than the edge of the PCB which seems unnecessary and might complicate installation in smaller cases.
The card requires two slots in your system.
The card has two DVI ports (one single-link, one dual-link), one full size HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPort outputs. AMD's display output logic is clearly superior to what NVIDIA has to offer at this time. Vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links) - and use them all at the same time. AMD has also introduced DisplayPort 1.2 support with their new cards which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.
An HDMI sound device is also included in the GPU. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit output. The new revision also brings support for Blu-ray 3D movies which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-ray 3D titles shipping.
You may combine up to four HD 69xx cards from any vendor in CrossFire.
Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (
front,
back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.