Gadgetory

hey what's up guys Jase 2 cents here and today we are going to take a look at another gtx 980ti graphics card i bet you never saw that coming did you now little bit earlier this year we took a look at the gtx 980ti gaming 6g from msi but they had pulled out all the stops with the bigger brother lightning edition card have you been putting off water cooling your computer because you're afraid that you're a klutz and you're just going to screw it up well that's okay because EK water blocks is launching its brand new line of predator water cooling loops that feature the exact same components that you would find and standalone custom built loops already put together for you so go ahead check out the pre-order link down in the description and while you're there you can buy back your man card trust me you want that man card back do it now now the lightning addition card has always been built from the ground up with one thing in mind can you guess what that one thing is they even write it on the card Oh see wait is backwards yeah see overclocking now the lightning features MSI's military-grade components which is very top-shelf selected components to be put on the PCB so that you get the highest quality parts you possibly can in this thing reducing the limiting or at least some of the contributing limiting factors of how far your overclock could go now they also have two BIOS on this thing there's a standard BIOS and an ln2 file so we'll talk about that as well in this video because I had some interesting results with that now also to because you're talking about overclocking additional TDP because this is a 375 watt TDP card using 2 8 pin PCI Express powers and a 6 pin PCI Express like I said for 375 watt TDP yeah 122 percent power limit as well as a plus 50 millivolt on top of the already over volted core on this thing now of course just like all other 980ti is it does feature 6 gigabytes of gddr5 that's running about 7,000 56 megahertz which is a little bit faster than other cards on the market but one of the things that people have had experiences with on this card is being able to not only overclock the GPU pretty far but also pushing the RAM to pretty insane levels and we definitely tested that as well now because overclocking cards can get insanely hot they have a massive cooler on this thing featuring five heat pipes and a heatsink that runs beyond the length of the card actively cooling not only the core but also the RAM and the VRM which is very important because if you're going to increase voltage you're going to increase the frequency of the GPU you're going to start exciting all those electrons and things are going to get really hot especially in the power delivery system so this thing is keeping that nice and cool now speaking of power delivery it's got 14 phase power delivery for the GPU as well as three-phase power delivery dedicated to the RAM so they've really thought this through on how they want this card to be you know power delivered to all of the components because this card is tailored towards high-end overclockers and like world-class overclockers you do have harnesses that plug into the back here so you can get live physical readings of V Corps as well as PLL and V droop so you're going to be able to monitor things that matter without relying on software because software is not very accurate when it comes to voltage monitoring now on the back here giving the card more rigidity because although it's a big giant card as you can see here even compared to their 6g card it is quite a bit bigger it's taller and longer than the reference model by quite a bit which can give it a bit more heft although it is heavy it's definitely not as heavy as the all copper EVGA kingpin 980ti but it's still pretty heavy nonetheless so they've got a backplate on here to give more rigidity it's black anodized brushed aluminum with the Lightning logo on here as well as the Lightning jet which has always been like the mascot for the Lightning series cards giving you nice rigid support is 4 Way SLI capable of course now one last thing to mention before we start doing the benchmarks because I know you guys are sick of hearing about the specs on this thing why don't you just show us the numbers J's you shut up and George the freaking numbers well I'm getting to that I want to tell you about their mystic lighting app though because the Lightning logo right here as long as as well as these white lines do light up as well as being able to be controlled and change the color the only unfortunate thing is it sitting right next to a bright yellow stripe so unless you're putting a yellow light on there which is by default or changing it to white it's pretty much going to be a color clash no matter what unless you're like a die-hard Lakers fan you could make it Lakers colors like purple and gold or maybe your 49ers fan you can red and gold or maybe although it's not really Gold's more yellow maybe you can be like really into Ironman so you can make it red and yellow whatever so the color is going to clash a bit with that light but I am going to give MSI and a for effort for including controllable lighting on there which I think all cards that cost $800 like this one should definitely have so let's go ahead and put this thing up against other 980 TI s and let's see exactly how well it performs so the 980ti lightning from MSI really didn't disappoint I achieved over 1500 megahertz which is kind of a magical number they're all the way up to 1530 now I was able to complete some tests higher than fifteen thirty at fifteen forty five but the problem was I was getting intermittent crashing and once they once you crash the test is invalidated and you have to back off the clock because if it can't pass one test of the Suites the entire suite is invalidated so I backed it off to fifteen thirty and that's where we saw a lot of success now I did overclock the memory on this thing as I mentioned I was going to do and achieved eight thousand fifty megahertz eight thousand fifty megahertz at 384 bit bus six gigabytes of it that was I saw here I saw pretty big gains by overclocking the memory so that was kind of a big deal and I did also overclock the kingpin memory as well that was also a plus five hundred on the memory for 1,000 megahertz overclock of the memory so both these cards are very comparable when you look at the chart on how well it performed even when put it up against the more expensive 980ti kingpin Edition from EVGA what I found kind of funny was the fact that the MSI Lightning card pretty much beat the EVGA 980ti kingpin in all the 1080p tests except for a couple but the kingpin card was beating the msi and the 1440p and 4k tests pretty much every time so what I think that is being attributed to is probably the memory being used in the cards now I can't confirm which memory is in here and I did enquire with MSI unfortunately they didn't get back to me in time before recording this but it overclocks very very well I don't know if it's Enix I even searched the internet and couldn't find I don't want to take the cooler off the card I don't want to take the car to part which obviously would allow me to confirm what is in there but otherwise I will say that the kingpin card uses Samsung memory which is a much tighter timing memory than Hynix so this is using helix then that might account for why the higher resolutions were a little bit lower on the FPS now when I say lower we're talking a couple of FPS which is also well than the margin of error but these were done on the same exact drivers as now one thing I want to point out is that if you're going to use the ln2 BIOS you need to know that there's not really any boost clock on that BIOS it's designed to be full manual overclocking because the card only went up to twelve hundred megahertz on the boost roll on the ln to by us without boosts it just went to twelve hundred megahertz and that was it so obviously when I started my test I noticed that it was getting just smashed by all the other 980ti is when we were comparing boost clocks and I realized there was no boost clock after asking MSI if that's the way it was supposed to be which they did confirm once I switched over to the standard BIOS I was able to overclock this thing all the way up to fifteen thirty but what I found funny was I couldn't get past fifteen hundred megahertz flat on the ln2 BIOS but I could get to fifteen thirty on the standard and and was stable so I don't know the voltage monitoring showed as well that the voltage was the same on both of those BIOS as well as the power target so I'm not entirely sure what changes with the ln2 BIOS but I do know I was less stable and that BIOS and I was on the standard so I just went to the standard and moved on the standard BIOS boosted up to fourteen eighteen on its own and then I pushed it up to fifteen thirty another 112 megahertz overclock on this thing and it did great so that's the MSI 980ti lightning it's just obliterating games in 1080p as you would expect if you're running a 1080p panel with high refresh rate like 144 Hertz then this could be a single card to max out your frame rates a refresh rate of your monitors otherwise if your gaming at 1080p again perfect card for 1080p 60 Hertz or higher but when it comes to 4k though this card is still not capable of running certain games at 4k at playable frame rates I'm sorry as much as you put for kale over the box an advertised 4k this card itself on games like Crysis 3 far cry 4 The Witcher 3 not playable at 4k whatsoever you would need SLI for that hope you guys enjoyed this video and finally got it out so you guys can leave me alone and I just want to mention to Kyle Kyle awesomesauce network did a very good impression of me however I want to want to correct some inaccuracies in that he did not use nearly enough hair gray hair spray whatever it is I'm Way more gray than that and second of all but a little J's mspaint servers getting 10 of these not 9 and the other 4 I have well yeah I am strapping them to my bike what of it got a problem come at me bro I think payback might be an order especially considering I'm sort of an impressionist myself get ready for a little payback maybe I ought to pay you a visit maybe we'll come over and smash you surprised in the face that was kind of mean order I'm just saying it's gonna awkwardly stare at you now for like the next 15 seconds not you guys I'm staring at Kyle right now staring into his soul yeah you guys don't want to see what I just saw No