Review: MSI Radeon HD 7970 Lightning
Published by Christian Ney on 18.10.12Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| MSI's Radeon HD 7970 Lightning
is an engineering masterpiece as Lightning cards have always been. For
normal users out of the box the card will offer 8 % more performance
over the stock clocked HD 7970. For extreme overclockers the real
potential of this card is revealed under cold. I mean this card is the
one used to break almost all 3D World Records. Thanks to his overworked
PCB and power design as well as being hardmod free with the special
unlocked BIOS. Unfotunately this card is not gold for normal users because the cooler is quite loud under load when playing demanding games. To fix this issue you can change the thermal grease to a better one like the Gelid GC-Extreme and fix the fan speed at 30 % in which case the card become almost noiseless and will still cool itself down. Keep an eye on temperatures using AfterBurner to be sure though. If the GPU is heating too much then you can raise the fans speed up to 40-45 %. |
- Noiseless in 2D
- PCB Design - Factory Overclocking - Bundle - Good cooling system - Dual BIOS - Triple Overvoltage |
- Noise level under load - 80 € more expensive than the cheapest HD 7970 - No Dual-link DVI | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Thanks to the factory overclocking, the HD 7970 Lightning was on average 8 % faster than the reference HD 7970, which is enough to justify the high price of the card along with the bundle and the other features. Furthermore the power consumption is not bad too, only 16 more Watts under heavy load than the reference card. In idle the power consumption can be considered as not good. Because of the overworked design as well as the use of only one phase in idle we thought that the card was going to draw less power than the reference design. We were wrong as it was actually drawing 5 more Watts. |
- Performance - 8 % faster than the reference HD 7970 |
- idle power consumption | |
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| In the end that's one hell of an engineering masterpiece, this card really belongs to the Lightning series. But unfortunately it is not perfect, we found the noise level of the fans under games too loud. Therefore our recommandation goes to noise resistent headphone-gamers as well as extreme overclockers. It is really a nice card to play with under cold, you almost have nothing to do but cool it down. |
- Gaming - Overclocking - Extreme Overclocking |
||
| We give the MSI Radeon HD 7970 Lightning very good 4 out of five stars. | |||
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Author: Christian Ney c.ney@ocaholic.ch
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