14 DAY TRIAL // As strange as it is to hear of a “Lite Edition” graphics card that is still overpowered compared to the reference board, we'll have to learn to deal with MSI's strange branding habits if we are to get through this outline of the GTX 780 Lightning Lite Edition.
The company gave this name to the new product because it's supposed to be a “Lite” version of the “normal” GTX 780 Lightning.
Said “normal” board drives the GK110-300-A2 graphics processing unit at 980 MHz on a normal day, and at 1033 MHz on a good one.
For the sake of comparison, the reference adapter from NVIDIA works at 863 MHz and 900 MHz, respectively.
That means that the MSI GTX 780 Lightning Lite Edition, with its 889/941 MHz Base/Boost GPU clocks, is somewhere in the lower half of the frequency gap.
The graphics processing unit is still the same though, meaning that the Lite Edition still has all the 2,304 CUDA cores, 192 TMUs (texture mapping units) and 48 ROPs (raster operating units).
On that note, the video controller also benefits from a 10-layer PCB (printed circuit board), Pure Digital PWM control, Twin BIOS (stock factory OC BIOS and one BIOS liquid-nitrogen cooling), a phase power design (PWM) with 16:3 phases, and everything else inherent in a construction involving the company's patented Military Class components.
Furthermore, the TriFrozr cooler is has a dual fin-stack heatsink, seven 8 mm heatpipes and 7 GT/s Elpida-branded memory chips as framebuffer.
The cooler also has three fans, two of 86 mm diameter on the sides and a central, 70 mm spinner. The board also uses 3 GB of GDDR5 that are left at 6008 MHz. As for connectivity, you'll find a DisplayPort, an HDMI and dual-DVI ports. No price known though, alas, but since the normal Lightning has a tag of $549.99 / €549.99, this one should be a bit cheaper.
