MSI N580GTX Lightning Review

1. Introduction2. MSI N580GTX Lightning3. Testing Methodology4. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark5. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage6. Synthetic: 3DMark 117. Synthetic: Stone Giant8. Synthetic: ShaderToy Mark9. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.010. Gaming Resident Evil 511. Gaming: Alien V Predator12. Gaming: Far Cry 213. Gaming: Mafia 214. Gaming: Lost Planet 215. Gaming: Dead Space 216. Gaming: Total War Shogun 217. Gaming: Metro 203318. Gaming: STALKER Clear Sky19. Gaming: Battlefield Bad Company 220. Technical: Acoustics Performance21. Technical: Thermal Dynamics22. Technical: Power Consumption23. Technical: Overclocking24. Closing Thoughts25. View All Pages

The GTX580 has been Nvidia's finest moment. The card has been a big seller since it was released and it leads many of the performance charts when we factor out the dual GPU solutions. Today we are looking at the MSI N580GTX Lightning, a heavily modified card designed to target the enthusiast gamer audience.

When MSI create a custom card, they don't do things by half measures, this card not only receives a custom PCB implementation from the MSI team, but it is supplied in a highly overclocked state with a metal, two fan cooler (Twin Frozr III).

MSI have also created a proprietary PCB design which allows for various software based voltage adjustments, just in case the preoverclocked settings aren't enough.

Product	nVidia GTX 580	MSI N580GTX Lightning
Shader Units	512	512
GPU	GF110	GF110
ROPs	48	48
Transistors	3000M	3000M
Memory Count	1.5GB	1.5GB
Memory Bus Width	384 bit	384 bit
Core Clock	772mhz	832 mhz
Memory Clock	1002 mhz	1050 mhz

The N580GTX Lightning arrives in a stealth bomber style box indicative of MSI artwork for this specific range of cards. It is a gatefold design and it folds open to reveal some of the specifications.

Our bundle was rather spartan, but it seems to be a well circulated ‘review' sample so bits and pieces such as the driver CD have clearly gone missing over the last couple of months. According to the official documentation there are 3 Voltage measurement cables supplied, we received 2.

The card is a two slot design and is built around a black PCB and the card is heavy due to the metal construction of the cooler.

There are three measurement points on the PCB which allow the enthuasiast user to measure specific voltages to aid overclocking. The card requires two eight pin PCI E power connectors to operate properly.

The N580GTX is SLI capable in 2,3 and 4 way configurations.

The card is equipped with two DVI ports, a single full sized HDMI port and a single full sized Displayport. You can only use two displays with this card simultaneously. The HDMI connector supports audio – DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD, DTS and 7.1 channel audio with 192 khz, 24 bit.

The cooler is a substantial design with 5 thick heatpipes running from the center.

The card is a custom, proprietary design from MSI featuring a 16 phase PWM design which was the world's first 16 phase implementation when the card was released. The card is specified with MSI's full range of ‘military class' components with Super Ferrite chokes delivering 10% better power efficiency and 30% higher current capacity. There are Hi-c Capacitors onboard which offer 15x less leakage and are (according to MSI), used on Space Shuttles and satellites.

An overview of the hardware according to GPUz. highlighting the overclocked core and memory figures.

To test this high end card today we have built a system with suitable matching components, based around a liquid cooled 12 core Intel i7 970 processor overclocked to 4.33ghz with 6GB of GKILL memory running at 1800mhz with tight timings. We will be mixing the resolutions, as we know that less than 1 percent of the audience have access to a 30 inch screen.

Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.33ghz
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65 (MS-7522)
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10
Power Supply: OCZ ZX 1250W
Memory: 6GB GSkill Performance Gaming ram @ 902.9 MHz (2:10) @ 7-8-7-24
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)
Monitors: Dell U2410 UltraSharp, LaCie 730, Iiyama Prolite E2472HDD x2

Other graphics cards for comparisons:
Nvidia GTX590
Nvidia GTX580
Nvidia GTX570
XFX HD5970 Black Edition 4GB (QuadFireX)
AMD HD6990
AMD HD6970
AMD HD6950
AMD HD6870
AMD HD6850
AMD HD5870
AMD HD5850
MSI N560GTX Ti Twin Frozr II
nVidia GTX570
nVidia GTX460 OC (715/900)

Software:
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Catalyst 11.5
Forceware 275.27 WHQL
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark
HQV 2.0 Software

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter

Games:
Mafia 2
Resident Evil 5
Far Cry 2
Alien V Predator
Lost Planet 2
Metro 2033
STALKER: Clear Sky
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Dead Space 2
Total War: Shogun 2

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests all games across five closely matched runs and average out the results to get an accurate median figure.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11.

We test at 1080p so that all video cards can be compared throughout our reviews. Obviously driver updates might enhance performance slightly over time, but as a rule, its a useful way for us to present the findings.

The GTX580 is a strong performer, but with these overclocked settings, the performance is improved significantly, generating a staggering 66.5 fps average, almost 6 fps faster than the reference clocked solution.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7.  This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

The fastest GTX580 we have tested to date, even faster than the Zotac GTX580 AMP!2 which we reviewed in April this year.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

This is the first time a GTX580 has scored over 7,000 points in our labs at these settings, a stunning result for the Lightning.

Stone Giant is a benchmark tech demo that showcases and measures DirectX 11 performance using the BitSquid Engine. This is a very heavy tessellation dependant benchmark which runs very well on nVidia hardware. AMD optimised their drivers for tessellation performance recently. We are using the default driver settings.

Around 8 frames per second faster than the reference GTX580, considerable gains. The AMD cards are slower with this particular benchmark, although the HD6990 delivers very strong results.

ShaderToyMark is an OpenGL benchmark, developed with GeeXLab, and focused on pixel shaders only.

In the words of the author … Why ShaderToyMark? Simply because I recently played with the pixel shaders available with Shader Toy, a great WebGL tool for testing GLSL shaders. And I said to myself: that would be nice to see several of these shaders running at the same time in the same 3D window… ShaderToyMark was born.

The contributors of Shader Toy are all famous demomakers and their shaders are real gems. It’s just amazing to see what can clever people do with some sin/cos and other math tricks.

We are using the default settings for our testing today.

The MSI N580GTX Lightning scores 56 fps, leading the performance charts by a considerable margin.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here.

	MSI N580GTX Lightning
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	3
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	5
Total	192

The hardware scores 192 points out of a possible 210. Great image quality for a media center system.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

The overclocked MSI GTX580 Lightning leaves the reference HD6970 in its wake, averaging around 30 fps more at these settings.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so cards are comparible throughout reviews.

The MSI N580GTX Lightning is leading the single GPU pack, delivering around 75 fps average.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High)

As we would expect, the MSI card generates a very consistent frame rate level, averaging at 116fps throughout the test environment.

Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta, the son of Sicilian immigrants. As the game progresses, Vito will join the Falcone Crime Family and become a made man. There are 15 chapters in the game, connected into one storyline.

We tested at 2560×1600 with fullscreen: on, antialiasing:on , Anisotrophic filtering: 16x, Shadow Quality: High, Ambient Occlusion: on, Geometry Detail: High and APEX PhysX: medium.

A noticeable frame rate improvement when compared with the reference clocked card. The GTX570 also puts in a good showing, maintaining a 30+fps at all times.

Lost Planet 2 is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Condition which is also made by Capcom, taking place ten years after the events of the first game, on the same fictional planet. The story takes place back on E.D.N. III 10 years after the events of the first game. The snow has melted to reveal jungles and more tropical areas that have taken the place of more frozen regions. The plot begins with Mercenaries fighting against Jungle Pirates.

After destroying a mine, the Mercenaries continue on to evacuate the area, in which a Category-G Akrid appears and attacks them. After being rescued, they find out their evacuation point (Where the Category-G appeared) was a set-up and no pick up team awaited them. Lost Planet 2 runs on the MT-Framework 2.0, an updated version of the engine used in several Capcom-developed games.

We are testing in DX11 mode with all settings on the highest. Direct X 11 features are on high.

Strong results from the overclocked GTX580, only 5 fps behind the dual GPU HD6990 solution at 830mhz core speeds.

Dead Space 2 is a survival horror third-person shooter. The player controls Isaac Clarke from a third-person point of view, looking over the character’s right shoulder. The game features no HUD elements, relying on holograms projected from the player character and his weapons to show information such as messages and ammunition count, respectively. Player health and stasis is shown by a visual indicators located on Isaac’s back. Isaac must fight an alien organism that infects and takes control of human corpses, turning them into “Necromorphs”, mutating their bodies.

Necromorphs must be dismembered as the alien organism controls host bodies via tentacles extending into their limbs. Other, larger types of Necromorphs that cannot be dismembered will often have yellow, glowing pustules, indicating weak spots. Occasionally, when an enemy gets close enough to Isaac, they will grab a hold of him, and the player must repeatedly press a key to fend off the enemy, with failure to do so leading to death of the player character.

A fantastic game and one that doesn't demand the most powerful gaming hardware either. The MSI N580GTX lightning powers through this without a problem generating around 190fps average.

Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths.

All settings are pushed to ultra with hardware shadows and SSAO enabled.

We use a very intensive game section to test at 1080p with the image quality settings maxed, and the Lightning proves to deliver excellent performance throughout.

The steam version of the game offers several prebuilt benchmark options which may be useful to test directly against your own system. Below are both results from the automated Direct X11 720p and 1080p benchmarks.

Metro 2033 is an action-oriented video game with a combination of survival horror and first-person shooter elements. The game is based on the novel Metro 2033 by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It was developed by 4A Games in Ukraine and released in March 2010 for the Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows.

The game utilizes multi-platform 4A Engine, running on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Microsoft Windows. There is some contention regarding whether the engine is based on the pre-release X-Ray engine (as claimed by Sergiy Grygorovych, the founder of GSC Game World, as well as users who have seen the 4A Engine SDK screenshots, citing visual similarities, shared resources, and technical evaluation of the pre-release 4A Engine demo conducted at the request of GSC Game World), or whether the engine is an original development (as claimed by 4A Games and Oles’ Shiskovtsov in particular) who claims it would have been impractical to retrofit the X-ray engine with console support). The PC version includes exclusive features such as DirectX 11 support and has been described as “a love letter to PC gamers” because of the developers’ choice “to make the PC version [especially] phenomenal”.

One of the more demanding engines available today, but the Lightning has no problems powering through the engine and maintaining a 30+fps result.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is a very eerie game. The Zone is a huge abandoned territory, with twenty-year-old dilapidated buildings, overgrown with forests and anomalous vegetation. It is a territory with deserted surface and underground research facilities, neglected military bases and testing grounds for new technologies. The radioactive land is covered with sores of burned out soil, poisonous fogs, and deadly gravitational anomalies. It is a world of a terrible anthropogenic disaster, and in the center of this hell sit the remains of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The in-game Zone is a reconstruction of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone around it. Moving along the storyline, the player will visit such places as the Swamps, the Red Forest, the Limansk city and, of course, the sarcophagus of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Many in-game locations have real prototypes.

The GTX580 is a great choice to power this demanding Direct X 11 title, holding the frame rates at 34 or above at all times. An average result of 50 fps indicates the power on tap.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (also known as Bad Company 2 or BF: BC2) is a first-person shooter video game developed by the Swedish firm EA Digital Illusions CE and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 systems. It is a part of the Battlefield series and was released worldwide in March 2010.

The game is primarily a squad-level online first person shooter based in a contemporary modern warfare setting. Additionally, the game includes a single player campaign, where the player reassumes the role of Preston Marlowe, the protagonist of the original game. The game’s Frostbite 1.5 engine allows for destructible environments, and multiplayer maps contain a wide selection of vehicles, aircraft and emplacements and allow for five different game modes.

We are testing in full Direct X 11 mode.

This is another one of the more demanding engines on test today and one that can cause problems for a wide selection of the hardware at the lower end of the scale. The GTX570 delivers playable frame rates, but the HD6950 can be a little stuttery in the more intensive sections.

We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The MSI N580GTX Lightning is a relatively quiet card, barely audible when gaming, averaging around 33 dBa. Under Furmark load this increases a little as the fan speeds increase to compensate.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 25c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

Furmark is a purely synthetic test, but it does give an indication of potential cooler limitations. In this case the card maxes out at 63c with fan speeds around 2,500 rpm, translating to 60 percent.

Return to ambient is a feature we have recently added to our reviews … we measure the time it takes for a solution to return to idle temperatures, immediately after full load. The faster the time, the better the cooler – for example a Noctua NH D14 cooler will return an Intel processor to idle temperatures much faster than a reference cooler. This is a good indication of how quickly a heatsink can dissipate heat.

The dual fan Twin Frozr III cooler is really impressive, ensuring that the return to idle time frame is kept relatively short – 20 seconds in total.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and record the results.

The N580GTX is a power hungry card, demanding around 220watts when gaming under load.

To overclock today we tried various tools, and settled on MSI’s Afterburner, or Rivatuner as it is better known.

MSI Afterburner allows for three series of voltage changes with this card, and the image above left highlights all three maxed out. This is not recommended however as the card temperatures will increase significantly and we experienced a system shut down. We tuned the Core Voltage to a +100mV, with memory voltage set to +50mV and aux voltage to +10 mV.

Our final clocks were extremely impressive, reaching 951mhz on the core and 1116mhz via the memory. The memory did increase to over 1200mhz, but we noticed some minor artifacting, even at 1125mhz.

Thanks to the substantial manual overclock, the end results are boosted considerably, to almost 74 fps, a new record for a single GPU based card design. Only 15fps behind the GTX590!

We have always been massively impressed with MSI's custom high end video cards and in our opinion they are just as good as the best, most expensive solutions from ASUS. The Twin Frozr III design in particular is a showcase of exactly how companies should design a cooler. The metal shroud is heavy, looks great, and ensures that temperatures are kept as low as possible. Dual fans with 5 thick heatpipes all connected to finely tuned custom power regulation ensure that even the most demanding of enthusiast users will have nothing to complain about.

On a performance level, Nvidia's GTX580 is still a stunning showcase of frame rate brute force. The card in reference form is a formidable weapon for a high resolution gamer, but in overclocked mode it can produce some staggering results. Over 7,000 points in 3DMark 11, and almost 75fps in the Tessellation heavy Unigine heaven benchmark are early indicators of the potential.

While MSI's N580GTX Lightning is already supplied in a highly overclocked state, our particular core had massive headroom, thanks in part to the voltage tuning options on offer via the MSI Afterburner software. We managed to break the 950mhz barrier from this particular sample which is one of the best results we have ever achieved. Obviously, overclocking can be very hit and miss, with even different samples from the same batch delivering mixed results.

The MSI N580GTX Lightning can be bought in the UK for around £440 inc vat.

Pros:

• the fastest single GPU card on the market.
• MSI's implementation is even faster
• Twin Frozr III cooler is one of the best available
• Voltage tuning options really help with overclocking
• Better value for money than the GTX590

Cons:

• It is expensive.

KitGuru says: Another showcase product from MSI and an ideal partner for a performance freak.

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