Msi 780 Lightning Edition Review

[xToFxREAPER]

Hello friemds and @Analog cause i know youll read this Its time now to share the greatness that is the 780 lightning with you guys. Now i know linus has done an unboxing and i though about posting it but i figured i might as well just use a few of the glamour shots i took myself with my phone at the time. That though can wait for a bit, without further ado here we go

 

Packaging and contents

So start off i have to say its heavy. very heavy for that matter. When i was purchasing it from my local retailer and he had handed me the box after paying i have to admit i damn near dropped the thing because it was that unexpectedly heavy Now along with heavy the packaging is large, like 2 times larger then any other gpu packaging i have yet to encounter. Now for those that didnt see linus' video im sure your wonder.. why is it so heavy? Well because it doesnt come in tradition cardboard and foam. No in fact in comes in what is more easily described as a damn treasure chest, When i had first got home with it in the packaging before even taking the sleeve off and finding out there was a chest like box inside of my family had croweded around me. My house hold is very tech savvy and when you see an extremely shiney almost chrome like golden/yellow and black box it grabs your attention. All of this made this card feel extremely premium and expensive which.. well it is still pretty up there even after price drops. Now upon pulling this chest like box out and opening it you go well.. where are all the spare cable adapters and cd's and certificate of authenticity that comes with these things? Well there is a drawer to with a spare ln2 mounting bracket and all those useless goodies Overall the only thing i can really say is i have never felt like such a man child in all my life as i did in the time i spent unpacking this videocard. you know there is no way its gotten damaged in shipping and you get a wicked box to keep things in after. After all this rambling about simple packaging im sure you would all love to see it so here are a few pics and then i will move onto my first impressions of the card.

 

My First Impressions

So upon looking the card over and drooling all over it (metaphorical dont worry ) i have to say this is the nicest lightning edition i have yet purchased. the refresh on msi's cooler design just made it feel like some new and amazing compared to the lightnings ive owned previously. The lightning logo on the edge/face of the card (the side you stare at in your case) actually lights up which i thought to be a nice touch, green for a low load blue for a medium load and red for a full load, nice touch msi . The backplate has some nice touches as well though it doesnt cover ALL of the pcb it covers more then enough and some of the cutouts actually look like lightning bolts which i thought pretty cool Now i have to admit i didnt play in the stock bios much to much, played a few games went holy hell this thing is a monster and moved on to the ln2 bios. Now reading reviews previously i was a little disappointed to get into the ln2 bios and find out the power limit was at 109% so naturally i questioned what happened because all the reviews i had read stated a 300% power limit. After some digging i found out nvidia was royally ticked and made them pull it so that bios is extremely hard to come by now. There is a user over on ocn by the name of skynet that pretty much emulated that bios with a few tweaks for those that REALLY want it. As for the ln2 bios thats included i have to say its not bad by any means, they allow a 100mv offset for the core and around the same or more on the memory and auxilary voltages making this a beast of a card if you know what your doing.

 

The Start Of My Overclocking Adventure

Im gonna say this now i wont be doing performance numbers till probably friday for a few reasons. First off school and work keep me pretty busy so i cant dedicated the amount of time i was able to a few months back when i only had school to deal with. Second reason is i want to find the max stable oc thats within a reasonable temperature range so i can do a stock vs oc'd result chart for you guys, So please be patient with me im trying to get the best representation of what this gpu can do i can for you all and why i think lightnings are hands down the best cards to buy (other then the new kingpin 780ti -.-) Now to start with i will mention that switching to the ln2 bios actually reverts the gpu to its reference clocks. Yup you read that right it reverts to nvidias stock settings. why they chose to do that i dont know but thats not a huge deal, i wanted to point this out for those that may have glanced a review on other sites and go "well your offset is near twice what his is and your not getting that much higher of an oc" well thats probably because hes not using the ln2 bios anyway the stock boost clock on this card with the factory oc is around 1033, now to be fair with gpu boost 2.0 i often saw more around 1126 or so. Currently im sitting at a boost clock of around 1320 and have yet to touch voltages at all with memory sitting at 6.6ghz effective clock. i set my fans at around 55% keeping them just below an audible level for my preferred gaming experience and the card has yet to break 65 degrees with this overclock pinned to 100% in bioshock infinite. That leaves me a ton of headroom to keep going and im planning to watercool this gpu as soon as possible as well giving me a ton of headroom to play with.

 

Conclusion (Atleast until i update and finalize everything in a few days that is)

Overall i wouldnt hesitate to recommend this card to someone. Even if your not planning to overclock with it just because of how overbuilt it is and the quality of components used make it a fantastic choice for the sheer longevity that this card will have. it looks absolutely amazing and if the yellow really isnt your thing the shroud comes apart extremely easily and the yellow piece is actually seperate from the black making it really easy to recolor, just gotta live with the blue led's again Ill give you guys some more closeups of the card itself to enjoy (please dont comment about my cpu tubing crossing the card, its the only way i could mount the rad and will get changed once i have the waterblock and more rads anyway) and if you have any comments or questions or think i may have missed something dont hesitate to ask, i love getting feedback as i totally suck at writing reviews.

 

Tight Squeeze

[Vendetta]

Super super super jealous. Can't wait to see how far you can push your card.

[Analog]

Great review man, I've been waiting for this! When you have the time you should also put some MSI Afterburner settings for those who want to get into overclocking this card as well. I would also like to see some Unigine Vally and Fire Strike X scores.

 

PS: Are you using the MSI Afterburner Beta 18? It has a switch in the settings menu and you can get additional core voltage options (up to +100) unlocked. With that I bet you can break the 1400MHz on the core threshold! It took me a while to realize that this existed since it is not a SE version of the program.  

[xToFxREAPER]

Great review man, I've been waiting for this! When you have the time you should also put some MSI Afterburner settings for those who want to get into overclocking this card as well. I would also like to see some Unigine Vally and Fire Strike X scores.

 

PS: Are you using the MSI Afterburner Beta 18? It has a switch in the settings menu and you can get additional core voltage options (up to +100) unlocked. With that I bet you can break the 1400MHz on the core threshold!  

yes i am, i thought +vcore setting was to do with the card actually either way im sure ill break 1400mhz but im not pushing to hard while its still on air but ill push the hell out of it once its under water. Ill post afterburner settings a little later with the performance updates when i get to them, im aiming to get atleast 7ghz on the memory and hopefully atleast 1400mhz on the core.

 

Super super super jealous. Can't wait to see how far you can push your card.

Me to, i had a 770 lighting that i had running at 1411mhz no issue, considering how far ive gotten without touching voltages i have high hopes for this card

[xToFxREAPER]

Great review man, I've been waiting for this! When you have the time you should also put some MSI Afterburner settings for those who want to get into overclocking this card as well. I would also like to see some Unigine Vally and Fire Strike X scores.

 

PS: Are you using the MSI Afterburner Beta 18? It has a switch in the settings menu and you can get additional core voltage options (up to +100) unlocked. With that I bet you can break the 1400MHz on the core threshold! It took me a while to realize that this existed since it is not a SE version of the program.  

Small update you may be interested in. Im up to 1346 on the core with 7ghz memory oc