Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing your first look at pretty much the baller s - GTX 680 out there at this point in time this is the MSI lightning edition featuring unlocked digital power and yes three year warranty as well but yes lightning edition cards have triple over voltage which means that unlike regular Kepler video cards that is to say everyone's Kepler video cards except MSI power Edition cards lightning edition cards or any cards that feature their triple over voltage technology weight so the other ones cannot overload the GPU cannot so your overclocking will always be limited MSI has unlocked that capability allowing you to like break World Records and more importantly than breaking World Records just actually get all the performance that you can get out of your video cards so you this one's got home yeah GPU reactor as well which is more for subzero overclocking but I'll show you guys that after unlocked BIOS to remove all protections including active phase switching over current protection and thermal design power restrictions BAM remove it all enhance power design giving you two times the power output 12 phase PWM design independent memory power and lightning power layer whatever that means but it's probably an additional layer to the PCB or something for cleaner signaling digital PWM controller for more precise voltage control etc etc most of the other cards don't even need this stuff because you can't overload them anyway 3x3 OSC kits so with v checkpoints so you can manually check voltages with a multimeter triple over voltage and triple 10th monitor so you can monitor the GPU memory and the vrm with afterburner afterburner by the way is my favorite video card overclocking software BarNone is just the best okay all military class three components you got your copper moss iceycat schooled and solid-state chokes and dark swollen caps i mean i think that's a bit of a you know ok ok you don't need you know a gold layer on your solid-state shows but looks baller dust removal technologies included with the trim twin froze or for cooler it's about super pipes dual 10 centimeter pwm fans high density fins which are good and bad depends dual form in one heat sinks you know what let's go ahead and get this baby open up this is uh this is a card that I've been very excited to have a look out here so in terms of accessories you got whoa a bunch of stuff okay so you got a couple six pin two eight pin PCIe power connectors you got your V checkpoint cables so you can adapt those out to something that's compatible with your multimeter got VGA DVI to VGA adapter but get rid of that long flexible black SLI bridge the very best kind as well as a certificate of working miss quality and stability quick user's guide drivers that you should throw away download the latest from the Nvidia website and the beastly card itself so let's just put this back together the thoughts cannot do that yeah yeah don't worry I'm just gonna do that for sure okay let's just gesturing to me mostly obscene gestures but it's okay I forgive him I get my hard time about things so he's got to get back in here every once in a while okay lightning card oh I thought this one had three power connectors I in fact I even said it in another video but don't mind me this has two PCIe eight pin power connectors 210 centimeter fans these are actually deeper fans than I'm used to seeing on video cards as well they have a bit more well depth to them they're also using the propeller blades which are more efficient blades and they have these plastic tips at the end that are supposed to reduce noise increase efficiency and generally be better it will spin this way on startup which will pull some of the air out that's you know launched into the heatsink out of it before it turns on which should in theory keep the heatsink pretty much dust free as long as you power cycle your computer every once in a while and I've seen this work in action with actually not an MSI card but with one of their competitors cards that features this counter-rotating boot up technology so it'll be a little loud at the start but you know don't be fazed by that it's all good it'll it'll it'll quiet down as soon as it starts spinning the right way huge cooling potential check this out so the radiator fins the aluminum fins go all the way from here all the way down to here all the way to the back of the card that is an enormous cooler for a single GPU I mean that amount of surface area could probably be handling a dual GPU graphics card at this point super pipes are also included so that's these thicker heat pipes here that are carrying the heat much further away from the GPU core itself right there there's a GK 104 graphics core that's the Kepler GPU that's featured in all the high end graphics card six seventy six eighty s6 90s all that good stuff you've also got okay this is one of the most rigid cards I've encountered you can see it has almost no flex to it no matter what I do and that's for a couple of reasons number one they've got a unison covering the vrm and the memory components check that out thick metal all the way here all the way up here giving it an amazing amount of structural rigidity all the way here there's those golden the golden guys right there golden girls golden years Wonder Years I don't know where I'm going with this and it also has a full backplate so there's a little bit of ventilation Holness going on here around the pwm as well as just general backplate in this so this is GPU reactor you don't have to keep it on you can take it off if you want but what it does is it basically builds more components into the very back of the GPU than they would otherwise physically be able to fit just as a little add-in daughterboard so like I said take it off if you want you can leave it on if you want it's more useful for subzero and extreme overclocking and well yeah I'm failing at it but I'll succeed see all right and you can actually orient this however you want as well so I'm going to do it this way because once it's installed I want everything to be right side up msi lightning there's also blue LEDs behind it that look pretty cool as well be noted that the improper installation of GPU reactor card may cause damage to the graphics card yeah that stands to reason well PCI Express 3.0 power data connector to SLI connectors for up to a 4 Way SLI functionality if you had four of these in one system even I would be jealous at that point would be 4 be honest supports up to three plus one display so you got dual DVI hdmi and displayport out on the back of the card a little bit of installation coming out the back but this is by and large an internal exhaust card and that color scheme oh my goodness because we actually recently unboxed the other side big bang empower motherboard and if this doesn't get your geek juices flowing I don't know what can because as far as air-cooled configs go that is about as beast looking as a guesser you gotta get you gotta get this angle for like back there so you can like see that oh I'm not asking a lover you arrange it so you can see like the yellow axe I actually really like the yellow accents on the board as well as on the video card itself now just like that's like hardware the only way that this could be more like porn is if I was pulling off all of the heat sinks because but then you wouldn't even have like the color coordination anyway so yeah I mean you know even if you get one of their slightly lower end cards featuring a Twin Frozr cooler with like a blue accent let's see what that looks like one way or another I think we can all agree that going with like an all msi sort of look and feel here is probably a good thing they haven't like just so figured out the whole aesthetics thing in the last little while here I love it so I think that pretty much covers it the important things to remember this gtx 680 will overclock better than other gtx 680 s period because you can over build the GPU this is very important to remember especially if you're spending a lot of money on a GPU you want to get the most performance out of it this is pretty much the way to go so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the msi gtx 680 lightning edition don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos