| Overclocking the MSI N680GTX Lightning |  |
| Articles - Featured Guides | |
| Written by David Ramsey | |
| Tuesday, 31 July 2012 | |
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Overclocking the MSI GeForce N680GTX Lightning
Manufacturer: Micro-Star International (MSI) Full Disclosure: MSI provided the product sample used in this article. Any overclocker knows that cranking the clock speed means that power usage goes up, and in many cases to get the best overclock it's necessary to increase the voltage as well. While enthusiast motherboards with modern digital power circuits make increasing the voltage to the CPU and motherboard components easy, it's not at all easy to do with most video cards. In fact to increase voltage to a video card's GPU generally requires some soldering skills. 
MSI's GTX680 Lightning is one of the first Kepler-based video cards built on a fully custom PCB, and MSI included the ability to adjust the voltage for the GPU, memory, and DLLs on the card. However, the software required to do this wasn't available at the time of my original review, so I decided not to waste time on benchmarking based on the limited overclocking I could achieve without voltage adjustment. Now that MSI Afterburner 2.2.3 is available, it's time for a full-bore overclocking run!
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Comments
It appears only MSI can bring out the very best in these gpu's. If only Nvidia would give these boutique card makers a freer rein to make these cards live up to their utmost potential.
We overclockers know the dangers of running these at the bleeding edge of high-performance and accept the responsibility of any consequences.
Nvidia should allow us to sign away their warranty and then give us the freedom to tweak these cards to the very edge of destruction. It's our cards and our risk and Nvidia needs to quit babying us.
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I'd love to be saddled with such pain. Honestly, I'd probably leave it stock except for special gaming sessions.
NVIDIA probably doesn't want to deal with folks who OC these cards ~too~ much and destroy them, then proclaim the card to be junk and ask for another one. So they attempt to keep them throttled down to acceptable levels.
For now, I'm happy with my two GTX570s in SLI, and my two XFX Radeon R7770 Core Editions in crossfire. Being retired, I no longer have the bucks to buy the best.
Both are quite acceptable playing my favorite shooters, and the R7770s are better than what I though they would be.
Benchmarks really tell the difference between the two setups, but usage does not.