Gadgetory

okay so at this point you no doubt quite familiar with the GeForce GTX to know each AI and you know what it's all about in terms of performance I personally looked at multiple versions here on the harbour unbox channel but this new MSI Lightning Z version is by far the biggest beefiest slot bendy monster I've come across yet like most behemoths we've come across this thing will hug through expansion slots but that is fairly typical and we did see this with gigabytes or ass extreme edition model however whereas the Auris card tipped the scales at fourteen hundred and sixty grams and for that I called it a porker the Lightning Z takes things to the next level at sixteen hundred and seventy five grams that's almost 1.7 kilos so needless to say it's an incredibly big heavy graphics card in terms of dimensions the thing measures three hundred and twenty millimeters long 140 millimeters tall and 61 millimeters thick before getting to the benchmark let's quickly tear down the card and take a look at the design also please note for this video I'm going to be focusing most of my attention on the thermal performance and overclocking since these are the two main points of interest for me with this graphics card I assume it's probably the same for most of you as well right soft with the backplate first I have to say the backplate on the Lightning's it actually looks very impressive I like the cutout vents the Lightning branding with the RGB backlighting and a copper heat pipe poking through those few vents once off we can see the backside of the plate now it does in fact feature a flat copper heat pipe running from end to end towards the middle of the pipe a bit off-center we find a thermal pad actually a pair of thermal pads though just one of them is on the heat pipe these thermal pads are located over the backside of the GPU so they're intended to extract any built-up heat on the back side of the PCB that leaks through from the GPU but cut the heat pipe then disperses this heat across the backplate so it doesn't get built up it's an interesting design I'm keen to try and run the card with and without the backplate to see what kind of difference it does make next the massive heatsink comes off in this section of the card accounts for nine hundred and ninety-one grams of cards total weight here we find a large nickel-plated copper base which comes in direct contact with half a dozen nickel-plated copper heat pipes in total there are two eight millimeter pipes and four six millimeter pipes MSI calls this their super pipe design basically these heat pipes are used to maximize heat extraction from the base and spread through the massive array of fins cooling those fins are three stalks 2.0 fans the other two fans measure 100 millimeters in diameter while the center fan is slightly smaller at 85 millimeters the fans feature a unique blade design and double ball bearings finally the last line of cooling Armour is a thick base plate which directly cools the memory and MOSFETs there are also some unique looking fin designs on the base plate or the heat spreader if you will and again these are designed to maximize the cooling performance by increasing the surface area and we even find another heat pipe here now we've worked our way to the PCB where we find a few interesting things the highlight here is the power delivery design which sees 14 phases for the GPU and three phases for the gddr5 X memory there's also an insane tree of eight pin PCIe power connectors each capable of delivering up to 150 watts of power input allowing overclockers to carefully monitor the card's vitals are a series of temperature probes covering things such as the GPU memory and VRM these probes can be monitored using msi afterburner utility overclocking is obviously what the cards all about and included is an Allen to modes which making this the perfect gtx 1080i for breaking World Records msi says the ln2 mode apparently lets overclockers remove things such as power current and thermal limits and this essentially means they don't need to go and hard modify the cards for themselves this is a feature MSI talked quite a bit about at Computex a few months ago now but in all honesty it really means nothing for the vast majority of people looking at buying a lightning Z graphics card what I want to know is how old is this crap his card overclocked without having to flick it over to the lm-2 mode after heading down to your local convenience store for some liquid nitrogen before we get to our customer overclocking though what kind of overclock has MSI applied from factory honestly there have been extremely conservative here per tick given nothing else about the card is even remotely conservative by default the card runs at a base clock speed of just fifteen hundred and eighty-two megahertz granted that's roughly a hundred megahertz over the Nvidia default spec it's nothing we haven't seen before in fact gigabyte went slightly higher with their extreme edition hitting sixteen hundred and seven megahertz so out of the box the GTX ten ATT whitening Z won't be blowing any socks off in terms of fps performance that said I do expect the temperatures to be very low and the operating volume to be even lower so let's go take a look the first thing I wanted to do before messing around with settings and msi afterburner utility was to see how hot the card ran in stock out-of-the-box configuration so to do just that I fired up the demanding and still incredibly good-looking Crysis 3 of course with the lightning z version of the GTX 280 at our disposal I didn't mess around the resolution was cranked up to 4k and the quality preset was maxed out this allowed for a minimum of 49 FPS with an average of almost 60 fps so not bad given the quality settings what I was keeping it on here was the GPU temperature and impressively it never rose above 65 degrees we hit this temperature at a fan speed of 1,250 rpm which I would describe as silent especially once the card is inside a PC case after another hour of gameplay the RPM did eventually hit 1300 rpm which it didn't make any noticeable difference to the operating volume this is an impressive result especially given the Auris gtx 1080i which did hit the same temperature but it did so with its fans spinning at 2,250 rpm while pallets equally large super jet stream was only a degree cooler at a much more audible 2200 rpm stock though the palette card was much quieter though here it did target 74 degrees so when it comes to operating temperatures the msi lightning Z is without question one of the best gtx 1082 eyes on the market though that's hardly a surprise given its size expect other high-end models such as the asou Strix or ms is own gaming ex for example to run quite a few degrees warmer one thing all aftermarket cards have in common though is their ability to run significantly cooler certain videos own Founders edition model which targets 84 degrees right so the next step was to a little tinkering and see just how fast we can make a lightning Z so this I unlocked the core voltage option in the MSI Afterburner software cranked it up to plus 100 and then maxed out the power and temp sliders as well this allowed for a base clock of sixteen hundred and fifty-one megahertz which sir a GPU boost 3.0 frequency of over to do.you hats at all times the gddr5 X memory also accepted a frequency of six thousand one hundred and fifty eight megahertz resulting in a throughput of twelve point three gigabits per second jumping back into Crysis 3 the core clock speed set for the most part at two thousand and twenty five megahertz which sadly isn't quite as high as the two thousand and fifty megahertz the Auris extreme gaming managed that said the card did still only hit 65 degrees occasionally peaking at 66 degrees for a second or so before returning to 65 degrees I played around with the fan speed profile and found you could still maintain virtual silence with the card overclock and running at around 55 degrees then with a fan speed maxed out for those of you who play with headphones for example the card hit just 47 degrees and frame rates when our much closer to 60 fps for the most part and the card seemed to hold an operating frequency now 2015 megahertz in Crysis 3 I also gave battlefield one a shot for a few rounds and never saw the GPU temp exceed 45 degrees again the fan speed was still at a hundred percent I wouldn't say the fan was ridiculously loud either at that speed I should also note that the vrm temps were also very low of course we are running the fan at full speed but still the temps maxed out at just 56 degrees overclocked using the default fan profile aver I'm did touch on 80 degrees at times but even then that's very manageable and well within safe operating parameters much the same we're seen when testing with dirt for the GPU maxed out just 45 degrees this time the VRMs have only just exceeded 50 degrees so overall things were running very cool indeed before wrapping up the temperature testing I webs out the digital thermometer to see how hot things got behind the GPU that is the back side of the PCB with and without the backplate installed so this test I left the overclock in place but went back to the auto fan speed profile so this meant the GPU was running at 65 degrees with out the back plate installed the PCB behind the GPU measured in at 59 degrees after about 20 minutes of gameplay in Crysis 3 and this seemed about right given the GPU was running at 65 degrees with that massive heatsink on top of it now with the back plate installed the digital thermometer was now reporting a maximum temperature of just 48 degrees again after 20 minutes of Crysis 3 has a massive 11 degree reduction in temperature and I have to admit I wasn't expecting to see improvement anything like that unfortunately I did run out of time I wasn't able to conduct further testing msi really put me under the pump with this one the turnaround time was quite brutal so I am very keen to see what others find wrapping up the testing let's take a look at a few graphs although I've already shown some gameplay footage and performance here is a look at how the msi gtx 1080i lightning Z compared to the Auris and found Edition models in battlefield 1 at 4k disappointingly in this title of lightning Z was a frame or two slower than the Extreme Edition and that's both stock and with our custom overclock the lightning Z pretty much matches the extreme gaming in Far Cry primal so pretty typical performance then for an overclocked GT x 1080 TI finally we find much the same when testing with Franta again the 4k resolution was used but there's not really much else to say here so let's move on as you no doubt aware by this point the lightning Z is a real slab of a graphics card but unlike say pallet super jet stream it does have some flair about it front on the graphics card looks very nice the backplate looks great as I've already said and I have to admit I love the RGB lighting on this thing I'm generally not a huge fan of RGB lighting I can appreciate it when it's done well and I have to admit it looks very awesome on the Lightning's II take G skills RGB memory for example that stuff looks great and when complemented with the lightning Z which gives a similar effect you have an amazing looking combo by default you do get an RGB rainbow effect which is very fancy however using the mystic light software you can really transform the cards look and have it match your build there are heaps of cool effects to choose from and you can also adjust the speed and brightness as well there's also 7 lighting zones that can be custom and overall the software seems to work very well it is a bit annoying though that the software must be loaded each time on startup for the color profile to be loaded okay so it's time to wrap things up what do I think of the msi gtx 1080 TI lightning zee it's a well built graphics card design wise i see no flaws and the build quality is excellent having said that though weight might be a concern i certainly wouldn't recommend transporting a pc with this thing installed sitting at my desk i didn't see any signs that would damage a PCI Express slot when mounted horizontally but a decent bump like if you're driving over a pothole with this thing in your boot of your car that could be a real issue that aside though the card looks amazing runs very cool and performance as well as any air-cooled GTX and ETI is going to and from what I can tell the backplate is more than just a fancy sheet of aluminium with a cool-looking RGB white strip the only problem with these extreme GTX to neeti eyes is that they don't really overclock any better than a base model card at least when using the stock air cooler or even a liquid cooler for that matter the Lightning's ii is however able to run very cool and overclocked so that's something in short do I like the Lightning's II absolutely is it one of the best gtx 280 eyes I've seen today 100% would I own it well that all depends on who's paying for it now doesn't it the gtx 980ti has an MSRP of $700 us and you can purchase certain models for that price right now the more serious cards such as MSI gaming or gigabytes or as Extreme Edition cost a bit more at 780 dollars u.s. then we have the EVGA hybrid gaming and the gigabyte Oris extreme water force other all-in-one liquid cooled models and they sell for a little over $800 the msi Lightning Z though well met things going to make your eyes water as it currently comes at an asking price of 870 dollars us here in Australia you can pick up a GTX 1080i for a an asking price of about a thousand 1100 ozzie of the horse GTX 1080i extreme for example that cost $550 which my opinion is getting a little bit pricey though sitting next to the lightning Z it's a veritable bug and down under the MSI monster starts at $1500 and I'm not sure what else to add to that really so on that note I'm going to end this review by saying the msi gtx 980ti lightnings it is a superb graphics card with an absurd asking price if you like this review please be sure to touch up the like button for us and let us know your thoughts below in the comment section I'm your host Steve see you again next time guys