14 DAY TRIAL // Since its introduction, MSI's Lightning series of graphics cards has managed to get the attention of enthusiasts everywhere thanks to its high overclocking potential, so the Taiwanese company plans to introduce two new additions to this successful series built on top of Nvidia's GTX 580 and AMD's HD 6970 GPUs.
As it is usually the case with Lightning graphics cards, these too use a custom PCB design, making better use of the vertical space available in most computer cases.
Compared to the reference samples, the cooling solution was also changed MSI deciding to go with a Twin Frozr III setup, both for the HD 6970 and for the GTX 580.
Just introduced, this cooler uses some pretty thick heatpipes for diving heat away from the graphics card core to the large aluminum heatsinks, two fans being added to drive the operating temperatures down.
Taking a quick look at the N580GTX Lightning, one can clearly see the PCB hasn't seen any huge changes when compared to the previously released GTX 480 Lighting.
Powered by two 8-pin PCIe connectors, the card uses a 16 phase PWM design, features GPU, Memory and PLL voltage adjustment via MSI’s Afterburner software and comes with a BIOS switch similar to that found on AMD's Radeon HD 6900 series of graphics cards.
The R6970 Lightning is built using an 18 phase PWM design and overclockers can adjust the voltage of the GPU, memory and VDDI via MSI’s Afterburner tool.
Just like the N580GTX Lightning this too features dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors.
Sadly, we don't know what the operating frequencies of these cards will be, as MSI will release this sort of details once the cards are officially launched.
According to SemiAccurate, this is bound to happen during CES, pricing also to be announced at the fair.
