Gadgetory

so I reached up to MSI and was like hey I thought we were gonna get to review the Lightning card you know that $1600 top-end RTX card they were like oh yeah we'll send you one this box is empty because they sent it in here so the reason why we're checking out the BLD or build service from NZXT it sounds like a wrap I swear to god it's because NZXT is the exclusive supplier for the Lightning card 4s is that you can't basically get it anywhere else now there are some other reviews on the Internet of the card standalone but for whatever reason they chose to send this to us for a specific reason we'll talk about it in just a second we've already talked about BLD we've done unboxing this stuff but I want to take a look at this build specifically because we did the gold build and we were like yeah we did golden NZXT he's like we did it better so we're gonna look at that today also - if you guys haven't seen our tour of the facility of how this boxes the build is created and boxed and shipped and all that then go and check that out we'll put a link in the description below so I'm not gonna be going into a lot of the specifics I am gonna tell you though we are giving this computer away with the Lightning card and all of that in there just not in this video so make sure you're subscribed or you will probably miss that announcement all right so here it is setup obviously on the desk so I went in and changed some of the lighting now there's two different things you use to control the Lighting's in this particular build NZXT scam controls the crack in and then the hue fans that are in here and we've also got the lighting strips that go looks like across the top the front and the bottom and then we use MSI mystic light to control the motherboard the RAM as well as the graphics card so we've gotta set a couple of things with the graphics card but first we're gonna talk about the specs this is a 9900 K that is running on an MSI z3 90m eg ace motherboard it's obviously got the 20 atti lightning Z graphics card from MSI 32 gigabytes of g.skill tried NZ RGB which we've also set purple I like the way that purple and gold looks it's sort of like a Laker theme well I'm not really like man it's the wrong shade of gold it's got a four terabyte Seagate Barracuda spinning hard drive as well as a one terabyte 970 Evo nvme m2 SSD we in terms of power supply it's got their new II 850 power supply in fact I've got one over here we're gonna be doing a video about this I need to get some equipment first so I can properly test OCP basically NZ FC is like hey put our power supply to the test test the OCP and I was like I don't want to kill my software or I don't kill my software of course but I want to kill my hardware and they're like well we're so confident our OCP if anything happens we'll take care of it and we'd love to better our product if it happens but we're so confident it won't happen they're gonna they want me to test it but I need to find the right way to test OCP rather than kind of taking the black wire and the red wire or the yellow wire in this case for 12 volt and going now in terms of the graphics card because this was the whole focus of why I wanted to do this video you can see here it's very similar to their trio it's got this brace right here which it's not really leaning on it right now but this uses up two slots so that the weight of this card if it sags will be absorbed by this brace and not the motherboard socket and the rear of the the case causing sag it's got a carbon fiber back plate with a RGB that also shows the right there I've said this to sort of like kind of a flickering light which I think it's kind of nice but it has a heat pipe in there as well you can kind of see it right there because my concern with it being a carbon fiber was like wait a minute that's gonna reject Heat which could be bouncing the heat right back at the card well they've got a heat pipe on here to move the heat to the end of the card and and then just allow it to sort of radiate away plus we have fans blowing directly on it but the coolest thing about this pet pun intended cool is the the OLED screen on the side right here so we've seen this on their motherboards but now they've implemented it into the Lightning's II card and you can go in here into the software with the dragon centre and change this information to what you want so I've got it cycling right now between the fan speed the core speed and the temperature so as we're kind of gaming and doing benchmarks and stuff you can just kind of look over glance at it and see holy crap that's kind of nice to have a you know just a quick visual reference but then again at this card costing $1600 for a single card it should it should maybe be in color I don't know I that's it's a little tangent maybe it should cook me breakfast too because that's that's expensive but of course we want to see how it does it overclocking and stuff so let's go ahead and let's just start pushing this and see what happens so I'm using Valley benchmark to kind of do so my overclock testing here in windowed mode so we can have msi afterburner running to do some of our overclock testing now it initially boosted up to 1995 but if you guys aren't aware with GPU boost 3.0 obviously that's an overclock as the temperature goes up this is gonna go down so the fan curve we found is fairly I mean it's only 826 rpm a53 see right now 1980s the frequency as you can see there so it's nice that they match it's only at 822 rpm which is which is nice but I mean I I think our card like this obviously acoustics are second to performance obviously first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and just max out the fans because like I said and you're probably gonna hear it now obviously I'm sorry this is not the quietest card on the market but obviously we want to keep it as cool as possible as we're overclocking it so the boost won't start to bring down our core clock the core voltage it's still up for debate whether or not this does anything this actually is theoretically moving the slider at where it adds more voltage at a lower core speed I guess so the curve moves down technically so that it goes higher voltage sooner to keep you from crashing as you push up the core clocks but whatever as we brought the temperature back down though as you can see these temps start normalizing and that might even come back up to 1995 so let's go ahead and increase that power limit now it only shows 108 but this is already a much higher TDP TDP card than the reference that's eight percent above the RT increased overall TDP of the card so I don't know exactly the TDP of this card is so don't look at that and go why is it only eight when the founders card is like 22 that that's why it's already at a hundred it's higher than probably the founders at 122 so we'll apply that that tells us by increasing our power limit that we were not hitting power limit which is why the core didn't change we could also check here on our monitoring and we would be able to see if we were hitting power limit I wish there was a light that would turn on that be my suggestion for MSI's have a little light that turns on or something on there that power limit is happening that it enables or illuminates that way you can see like oh we're power limited because with r-tx it's it's more often than not power limited than anything temperature or whatever so if we go and find our power limit its power percentage yeah look at that so even though we haven't maxed out we're not even hitting a hundred this is total percentage of power draw available to the card so we're sitting at seventy nine percent or eighty percent of one hundred and eight so the card won't fraud on two hits 108 as you can see we're hitting into 80 so obviously the power delivery of this card is extremely robust and built up as it should be it's got three PCI Express eight pin power plugs on there so the amount of power on this card could theoretically pull more than 500 Watts if allowed to but I don't think that it's gonna even get anywhere near there now for reference here what we're checking is my speaking of reference my founders edition card will actually achieve twenty one thirty sustained with the fans at one hundred percent as high as twenty one ninety that's pretty significant so I want to see if we can even match that course because if you can't match the core speed then what is all this extra stuff do so that's why you have to hope that they're doing proper binning of these cards otherwise oh we just crashed at plus 150 that was twenty one thirty and we just crashed right there and see it recovered sort of okay well let's see if we can bring it back kudos on the drivers the driver recovery given what we just went through with AMD this was a little welcome sight to see I'm telling you alright 110 I'm gonna move this up just to see the placebo wise oh look at that as soon as I move that up you see that jumped up so maybe this is doing something on this particular card if I slide this back down it goes back down to 2100 it doesn't one go any higher it's like when I maxed out all those other voltages it like freaked it out didn't it let's bring those down well I didn't bring down that far that's my bad all right so I'm trying to get this to match our founders card unfortunately we're not able to get it they're moving the voltage slider really doesn't do anything I'm watching the voltage readout it's always at 10:43 is where it seems to max out power limit doesn't make a difference because the increased power limit of the card already means we're not hitting power limit so that's what would make this like out of the box faster than like the reference card of the founders card plus 110 and plus 1,000 on the memory seems to be about as far as I can push this card without it really starting to freak out and then maxing out the fans because this will climb rather quickly if you don't so I mean although it's a it's a custom card that's supposedly Bend and yeah unfortunately we can't get the core speed to match but that's kind of been the case as long as NVIDIA has been having reference or founders Edition cards which goes back to Pascal Nvidia kind of keeps the best silicon for themselves and then everyone else just kind of sorta has to bend the leftovers that they get and then come up with their tiered systems so that's why I'm seem to be stuck here right around the 20 100-ish range at the end of the day it's still a great card it's just obviously this one has a huge price premium along with it but I want to give a huge thank you to NZXT though for at least sending me this system to do this review with obviously they took the gold and black that's built into the card and turned it into sort of a theme very similar to what I did with the RT X build they r-tx Titan build now I'm going to be giving away this system but not in this video so it's very important that you be following on social media and be subscribed to the channel because that's how you're gonna find out about that so NZXT was like hey we want to do something we'd love for you to take the system and then give it away so all the details and stuff on that will be coming later I will not be answering any of those questions in this video there will be obviously a piece for it now if you guys haven't heard of NZXT SB LD or build basically the websites called let's build calm there's a link down the description below and it's the only SI that I know of well obviously that you can buy the Lightning card from if this is the card you want because they are the exclusive supplier for the SIS on the lightning Z it's a very limited edition card as well so if you want it you probably are gonna want to act the other thing is it's the only essay I know we can go in choose up to believe it's up to three games that you want to play the FPS you want to play that and the price point that you're willing to spend and it will give you the expected results in terms of performance and you can shop by fps you can shop by dollar amount customise the parts in there and basically they'll build it and of course they have their blitz service where if you order it by 11:00 a.m. Pacific time you can have it built tested and shipped same day making it one of the fastest s eyes that you can order from and they keep the pricing pretty much at MSRP that's one of the reasons why I'm a huge promoter of BLD because of the fact that during the whole cryptocurrency mining craze they didn't jack up the prices of their cards they kept them at MSRP making si is a much more enticing option than they were prior to the cryptocurrency craze because typically you could build it cheaper on your own so that's why you're seeing a lot more si stuff on this channel because it's a it's a it's a good service if you're afraid to build your own computer or you want a warranty or maybe you're used to building your own computers and this time you just don't want to so anyway we're gonna go guys stay tuned for the giveaway on this again a huge thank you to MSI NZ and the NZXT for sponsoring today's video and as always we will see you guys in the next one that is cool though I want that who am out of breath now [Laughter]