14 DAY TRIAL // The Radeon HD 5870 graphics card from Advanced Micro Devices is already famous for its bleeding-edge overclocking capabilities. Introduced some time ago, the product has been launched in a variety of forms by different hardware manufacturers, each model pushing to surpass the competition with modifications to cooling or clock boosts.
Nevertheless, one company, MSI, to be exact, was rumored to be working on a Lightning edition of the adapter. More recently, the people over at techPowerUp managed to get their hands on a number of pictures of the disassembled model.
Back when it was first hinted at, the MSI HD 5870 Lightning was described with a PCB larger than reference cards, as well as a 12-phase vGPU and a 3-phase vMEM. Use of high-C surface-mount capacitors was implied and there was a high likelihood that MSI would be using a high-end cooling mechanism. Other than that, the connectivity capabilities were no different from those of the original, with two DVI-D connectors and one each of DisplayPort and HDMI.
The only specification of the model that was not yet completely certain was the implementation of two 8-pin PCI-Express power connectors. Now, however, the photos confirm their existence, which means that overclockers will have quite a bit of power to work with, allowing them to push the clock speeds to very high levels. Users that know their way around voltage adjustments will also be pleased to hear that the measuring points for the graphics processing unit's (GPU) voltages are easily accessible.
Of course, there is still no telling when and where the card becomes available, or how high a price tag it will carry. Nevertheless, the Lightning Edition of the ATI Radeon HD 5870 will generate significant hype when it does come out, as overclockers will most likely be eager to try it out.