World-renowned graphics card and mainboard manufacturer MSI has officially launched the next generation of Lightning series: the R5870 Lightning. The 1st N260GTX Lighting was the first to break the 1.1GHz barrier on a VGA card. The 2nd N275GTX Lighting continues to hold the record of fastest clocked single core nVidia GPU. The newest member the Lighting family is based on the ATI R5870 GPU core and is ready to redefine the GPU speed limit.
15-phase PWM Design & Lightning Power Layer
The new MSI R5870 Lightning features the industry’s first 15-phase (13+2) power supply design. Compared to the reference design 7 (5+2) phase power supply module, it provides more than twice the power required by the GPU.
It also features two 8-pin external power connector*, allowing for increased power supply for the R5870 GPU. In addition, the design of the R5870 Lightning also incorporated a custom made PCB design called the Lightning Power Layer (LPL), which is designed for the GPU and memory power. This incresaes the stability of the power supply and also reduces noise.
High quality components
In addition to its innovations in power supply design, the all-new MSI R5870 Lightning also uses military class components. In order to enhance the quality of power supply of the GPU, a next-generation capacitor – the Hi-c CAP – has been utilized. Compared to the solid-state capacitors currently used in high-end graphics cards, this new design improves lifespan up to 8 times, as well as lowering temperature and improving overclockablity.
To provide better power quality to the GPU, the R5870 Lighting also introduces the Proadlizer capacitor in a decoupling circuit design. This can not only provide very high current to the GPU, but it also provides a clean power signal to the GPU. Because of the flat footprint it is extremly suitable for heavy cooling solutions.
Extreme cooling solution
The R5870 Lightning is equipped with the award winning Twin Frozr II thermal design. Besides the silent dual 8cm PWM fans it is also equipped with the best-in-class 8mm SuperPipe technology. This bigger heat pipe can distributed heat more quickly to the high density heat-sink making it the most advanced thermal design in the industry.
The memory chips, the Hi-c CAPs, the Proadlizer and the MOSFETS are covered by a large cooling plate. This provides additional cooling to critical components when overclocking. This secret weapon does not interfere with Liquid Nitrogen containers.
Pushing it to the limit
The R5870 Lightning graphics card is optimised for MSI's exclusive Afterburner overclocking software. Not only can it adjust the GPU and memory clocks but it can also adjust the GPU core voltage. MSI Afterburner comes with the new Kombustor burn-in tool which allows testing the VGA card for stability.
The MSI R5870 Lightning graphics card also comes with V-Check Points for easy measurement of GPU and memory voltage without modding any hardware circuit. This helps expert overclockers monitoring real-time the voltage of the cards.
Overclocking competition
TTo let the recently introduced MSI Hawk series and the R5870 Lightning series proof its capabilities MSI organizes together with AMD & Futuremark an overclocking contest where everybody can join. This contest will be held from the 25th of February until the 24th of March and each week there will be graphic card give aways. For more details you can check: http://www.futuremark.com/community/competitions/msilightning/
For more information about price and availability, please contact a local official MSI distributor.
