14 DAY TRIAL // In late May, MSI announced that it has finalized the design of the company's most powerful single-GPU graphics care to date, the 3GB N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition, and now the company is finally getting ready to ship the GPU to its distributors.
The card is fitted with the same Twin Frozr III cooling system as the regular Lightning, which uses five copper heatpipes to draw the heat away from the GPU and into a massive aluminum heatsink.
This heat is then dissipated by two 90mm fans that have been coated with a special paint which changes color from blue to white when temperatures go over 45 degrees Celsius.
The PCB was also heavily modified from Nvidia's reference design and it now features a 16-phase PWM, independent memory power, Military Class II components, four proadlizer chips as well as 3GB of video buffer.
This last change should help the graphics card perform better when running multi-monitor setups at high resolutions or in games that feature high-quality textures such as Metro 2033 or Shogun 2.
Since we are dealing with a Lightning-series graphics card, MSI has also added a wide variety of overclocking features to the card, including DIP switches for disabling Nvidia's over current protection, to unlock the GPU and MEM voltages, or two change between two different BIOS firmwares.
A switch for enabling a special LN2 mode is also available together with a series of voltage monitoring point and phase activity LEDs.
The card's operating frequencies have also been raised, compared to the regular version of the GTX 580, and the core now runs at 832MHz, while the memory is set at 1050MHz (4200MHz data rate).
The MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition is expected to reach hardware dealers in a few days time. Pricing should hover around the €520 mark.
Nvidia's GeForce GTX 580 is based on the GF110 core and it packs 512 stream processors, 64 texture units, 48 ROP units, and a 384-bit memory interface that is usually linked to a 1.5GB GDDR5 frame buffer. (via HardwareLuxx)