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MSI Radeon HD 7970 Lightning 3 GB
Packaging & Contents »Introduction
AMD's Radeon HD 7970 has been on the market for a while now. The card introduced a new shader architecture and brought numerous improvements in power consumption. It later met heavy opposition from NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680, which has caused HD 7970 pricing to go down in recent weeks.
MSI's Radeon HD 7970 Lightning is a heavily customized implementation of the HD 7970 with focus on performance and overclocking. The card uses a beefed up voltage regulation circuitry and massive dual-fan heatsink to ensure stable operation at MSI's increased clock speeds of 1070 MHz. Memory clock has gone up too, up to 1400 MHz. Thanks to recent price cuts across the HD 7900 Series, the MSI HD 7970 Lightning now retails at $520.
| Radeon HD 6970 | Radeon HD 7870 | GeForce GTX 580 | Radeon HD 7950 | Radeon HD 7970 | MSI HD 7970 Lightning | GeForce GTX 680 | Radeon HD 6990 | GeForce GTX 590 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shader Units | 1536 | 1280 | 512 | 1792 | 2048 | 2048 | 1536 | 2x 1536 | 2x 512 | |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 48 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 2x 32 | 2x 48 | |
| Graphics Processor | Cayman | Pitcairn | GF110 | Tahiti | Tahiti | Tahiti | GK104 | 2x Cayman | 2x GF110 | |
| Transistors | 2640M | 2800M | 3000M | 4310M | 4310M | 4310M | 3500M | 2x 2640M | 2x 3000M | |
| Memory Size | 2048 MB | 2048 MB | 1536 MB | 3072 MB | 3072 MB | 3072 MB | 2048 MB | 2x 2048 MB | 2x 1536 MB | |
| Memory Bus Width | 256 bit | 256 bit | 384 bit | 384 bit | 384 bit | 384 bit | 256 bit | 2x 256 bit | 2x 384 bit | |
| Core Clock | 880 MHz | 1000 MHz | 772 MHz | 800 MHz | 925 MHz | 1070 MHz | 1006 MHz+ | 830 MHz | 607 MHz | |
| Memory Clock | 1375 MHz | 1200 MHz | 1002 MHz | 1250 MHz | 1375 MHz | 1400 MHz | 1058 MHz | 1250 MHz | 855 MHz | |
| Price | $340 | $330 | $380 | $380 | $450 | $520 | $500 | $700 | $750 |