OcUK Staff
The MSI lightning range of cards has been the most successful overclocking series of cards ever made for benching and gamer's alike.
With this MSI have taken both AMD and Nvidia high end GPU redesigned the PCB and power delivery to produce a true hero product.
The last Lightning series was R290X lightning for me a great product taking all benching WR's from single GPU to quad Crossfire. This being said I was very pleased to learn MSI had designed a 980 Ti lightning and that I would be able to bench test it on air cooling and beyond.
The MSI 980 Ti lighting design is robust to say the least. Both in PCB design and cooling its over engineered so that every ounce of performance can be extracted from the 980 TI GPU.
The PCB is a 10 layer design with full 10 Phase Power supplying the GPU alone. The memory has further 3 phase delivery so as to get as much stable power to the mems as possible and enhance the overclocking potential.
The MSI 980 Ti Lightning has a distinctive Black and yellow triple fan cooler that matches perfectly there own M Power or X power Series of motherboards as well as any other black or black and yellow combination motherboards. The card has a full length black back plate which adds rigidity to the PCB, extra cooling and looks great with the lightning branding visible too. On air 2 way SLI is no issue at all but three and four way may need water as to my eyes the fan blades would hit the card below if not a slightly larger gap than 2 slot was available.
Here we have some pics of this aesthetically great looking card mounted in my test rig ready for testing.
Lets now check out some performance results when overclocked. For these overclocking tests I used MSI afterburner to control the card but added no voltage and used the auto fan profile so as the results I achieve can be attained by all most end users dependent on sample quality of course.
Test Rig:
5960X 4875mhz
ASUS RVE X99 motherboard
Kingston DDR4 Predators
8Pack 2000w PSU
Kingston SSD
Windows 8.1 64 Bit
Nvidia Forceware 353.06 Drivers.
3D mark Firestrike
3D Mark Firestrike Xtreme
3D Mark Firestrike Ultra
Heaven 1080P (maxed out)
Valley 1080p Extreme HD
Valley 4K Extreme HD
As you can see from the benchmarks the overclocking performance of this Ti is very high with 1525-1550 mhz core and 2125-2150+ mhz mems no problem on the stock cooler. This is infact the best performing 980 Ti I have ever tested on stock volts and cooling which is very impressive given I have already reviewed many of the flagship cards from all the major players.
Check out our OCUK forum Firestrike thread and you will see this card with a touch of volts beating all water cooled Titan X never mind Ti giving you a measure of how good this Ti really is.
The cooler is both quiet in operation and effective in cooling this overclocked Ti. My sample never got above 68C when being bench tested for a long period of time at high mhz and if for benching you force the fan to full it never exceeds 63C running full pelt!!
In conclusion I recommend this TI to all gamers and overclockers. It is a cool, quiet,well built, performance monster!! and the best I have tested to date.
I will add some LN2 testing results to this review in time. Some world records on the way I think
With this MSI have taken both AMD and Nvidia high end GPU redesigned the PCB and power delivery to produce a true hero product.
The last Lightning series was R290X lightning for me a great product taking all benching WR's from single GPU to quad Crossfire. This being said I was very pleased to learn MSI had designed a 980 Ti lightning and that I would be able to bench test it on air cooling and beyond.
The MSI 980 Ti lighting design is robust to say the least. Both in PCB design and cooling its over engineered so that every ounce of performance can be extracted from the 980 TI GPU.
The PCB is a 10 layer design with full 10 Phase Power supplying the GPU alone. The memory has further 3 phase delivery so as to get as much stable power to the mems as possible and enhance the overclocking potential.
The MSI 980 Ti Lightning has a distinctive Black and yellow triple fan cooler that matches perfectly there own M Power or X power Series of motherboards as well as any other black or black and yellow combination motherboards. The card has a full length black back plate which adds rigidity to the PCB, extra cooling and looks great with the lightning branding visible too. On air 2 way SLI is no issue at all but three and four way may need water as to my eyes the fan blades would hit the card below if not a slightly larger gap than 2 slot was available.
Here we have some pics of this aesthetically great looking card mounted in my test rig ready for testing.
Lets now check out some performance results when overclocked. For these overclocking tests I used MSI afterburner to control the card but added no voltage and used the auto fan profile so as the results I achieve can be attained by all most end users dependent on sample quality of course.
Test Rig:
5960X 4875mhz
ASUS RVE X99 motherboard
Kingston DDR4 Predators
8Pack 2000w PSU
Kingston SSD
Windows 8.1 64 Bit
Nvidia Forceware 353.06 Drivers.
3D mark Firestrike
3D Mark Firestrike Xtreme
3D Mark Firestrike Ultra
Heaven 1080P (maxed out)
Valley 1080p Extreme HD
Valley 4K Extreme HD
As you can see from the benchmarks the overclocking performance of this Ti is very high with 1525-1550 mhz core and 2125-2150+ mhz mems no problem on the stock cooler. This is infact the best performing 980 Ti I have ever tested on stock volts and cooling which is very impressive given I have already reviewed many of the flagship cards from all the major players.
Check out our OCUK forum Firestrike thread and you will see this card with a touch of volts beating all water cooled Titan X never mind Ti giving you a measure of how good this Ti really is.
The cooler is both quiet in operation and effective in cooling this overclocked Ti. My sample never got above 68C when being bench tested for a long period of time at high mhz and if for benching you force the fan to full it never exceeds 63C running full pelt!!
In conclusion I recommend this TI to all gamers and overclockers. It is a cool, quiet,well built, performance monster!! and the best I have tested to date.
I will add some LN2 testing results to this review in time. Some world records on the way I think
