| MSI GeForce GTX 680 Lightning Video Card |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |
| Written by David Ramsey | |
| Monday, 09 July 2012 | |
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MSI GeForce GTX 680 Lightning Video Card
Manufacturer: Micro-Star International (MSI) Full Disclosure: MSI provided the product sample used in this article. Now that the Kepler drought has finally eased, NVIDIA's retail partners can start providing the overclocked and top-spec'd versions of their GTX 680 video cards. GPUs typically have some exploitable "headroom" in their clock frequency and power specifications, and often all a vendor needs to do to make use of this headroom is outfit the card with an improved cooler. Kepler-based cards make this proposition more difficult than it has historically been since NVIDIA's reference cooler is very good: effectively and quiet. It's not that absolute best that can be done within a two-slot form factor, but it's much closer to that ideal than it has been in the past, and it's helped by the fact that Kepler GPUs are much less power-hungry than previous generations. Less power means less heat, which makes the card easier to cool. Not that MSI would be content with anything so mundane as just a new cooler for their Lightning product lineup. While they do offer variants of the GTX 680 with their signature Twin Frozr cooling system as the sole distinguishing feature, the N680GTX Lightning is built upon a completely new custom PCB that owes nothing to NVIDIA's reference design. 
With greatly enhanced power circuitry as well as mil-spec components and an unlocked BIOS, impressive overclocks should be possible...and you should expect them given the card's substantial price premium over a reference design GTX 680.
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Comments
I don't know if this was due to time constraints, but the depth of the closer look seems to have been shortened compared to say, this review:
#benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=752&Itemid=72&limit=1&limitstart=1
In particular, one thing that might be interesting to see is if MSI is still using excessive thermal paste.
It's not a card aimed at those maxing price-performance; just absolute single GPU performance, which this card does very well at.
Otherwise, it's a solid review and a very impressive enthusiast card.
The GPU voltage lock is very frustrating on the 680s - almost to the point where some people have recommended getting a 7970 over a 680.
You might want to do your OC testing now.
It seems that MSI forgot to tell Unwinder what his software can do. :p
Some available motherboards (EVGA X79 Classified, for example) will allow you to use three dual-slot graphics cards with at least one slot's worth of space between each pair of cards. Of course you'd need an 8 or 10 slot case to pull this off. But you're right: system builders must take thermals into account when designing their rigs.
I just remembered the above quote.
When are you going to do another review now that MSI Afterburner Version 2.3.0 (2012/11/200 is here? I'd really like to know how these cards run with the voltage that was intended for them.