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In the last month AMD's partners have been unveiling their custom cooled graphics cards and we have already reviewed the latest Dual X HD7970 Overclock Edition from Sapphire and the HD7970 X Edition from VTX3D. Today we are looking at MSI's flagship R7970 Lightning with custom twin fan cooler and proprietary PCB design.
MSI tend to bring their graphics cards to market later, much like ASUS. If past experiences are anything to go by however, the wait is normally worth it.
The MSI R7970 Lightning is a highly modified solution, with pre-overclocked speeds ‘out of the box' and custom PCB design. This card uses the latest version of the Twin Frozr metal cooler which started development in 2009.
The R7970 Lightning ships with a whopping overclock on the core – from 925mhz to 1,070mhz.
| Product | MSI R7970 Lightning | AMD HD7950 | AMD HD7870 | AMD HD7850 |
| Core Clock speed | 925mhz (1070mhz) |
800mhz | 1000mhz | 860mhz |
| Transistors | 4.31 billion | 4.31 billion | 2.8 billion | 2.8 billion |
| Stream Processors | 2,048 | 1,792 | 1,280 | 1,024 |
| Compute Performance | 3.79 TFLOPS | 2.87 TFLOPS | 2.56 TFLOPS | 1.76 TFLOPS |
| Texture Units | 128 | 112 | 80 | 64 |
| Texture Fillrate | 118.4 GT/s | 89.6 GT/s | 80 GT/s | 55.0 GT/s |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| Pixel Fillrate | 29.6 GP/s | 25.6 GP/s | 32.0 GP/s | 27.52 GP/s |
| Z/Stencil | 128 | 128 | 128 | 128 |
| Memory Type | 3GB GDDR5 | 3GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 | 2GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Clock | 1,375mhz (1,400mhz) |
1,250mhz | 1,200mhz | 1,200mhz |
| Memory Data Rate | 5.5 GBps (5.6Gbps) |
5.0 Gbps | 4.8 Gbps | 4.8 Gbps |
| Memory Bandwidth | 264 GB/s | 240 GB/s | 153.6 GB/s | 153.6 GB/s |
Above, the clock increases in bold. The memory overclock is modest – 25mhz (100 mhz effective) faster than the reference clocked card. However the core receives a huge increase of 145mhz to 1,070mhz. This should have a significant impact on the results.
