Gadgetory

by an unlocked Intel fourth gen core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 total war click now to learn more it's lightening time again folks MSI has their regular cards then they are gaming cards both of which are pretty sweet but they're truly flagship graphics cards are branded a lightning presumably because they are so flashy looking or wait no hold on probably because they're powerful and lightning is made of electricity and clouds wait hold on just electricity how does even so the first thing you're going to notice about this graphics card is the weight holy balls it comes in an awesome carrying case style box with a full set of accessories including PCI Express 6 pin 2 8 pin adapters and even an alternate back plate for the card if you just want its aside to swap out the full-length one for just a smaller short one once the box is open the next obvious thing is the fact that this is not a reference card I mean here there's a picture of a reference card for context in a smaller and puny ER in every possible way because of this you will need to make sure that your system is capable of containing the greatness of the gtx 780 lightning side panel fans could interfere with its increased height and you'll need to make sure that you have enough expansion slots free because due to its 2 plus slot cooler it will take up 1 to 3 PCI slots now because the card is based on the geforce gtx 780 GPU there are no real surprises in terms of normal nvidia graphics card features you got support for sli 3d vision physics cuda g-sync and of course GeForce experience which has now added game streaming to compatible devices like Nvidia shield low overhead gameplay recording and twitch live streaming to its ability to optimize your game settings and keep your graphics drivers all up-to-date and all good stuff but that's not why you were shopping for a lightning let's talk about what makes this card special first up is the fact that this is a very non reference PCB it utilizes components with emphasized military class concept including the arm loss for copper loss I see cats new super ferrite chokes and they're dark solid capacitors so unless you've got some electrical engineering under your belt most of that probably sounded like gibberish but the point is that even though the mill standard 810g compliance doesn't really mean much a lightning cart is capable of running faster cooler and longer than a typical reference card second is their triple force architecture so the Lightning logo on the top illuminates green blue or red depending on the load their twin froze or cooler design has been updated to a tri frozer with three PWM controlled propeller blade fans rather than two and their power delivery system for the card itself has been decked out with an all digital design core memory and auxiliary voltage are all digital next up is the GPU reactor which is basically like an extra PCB strapped to the back of the card to reduce ripple and increase power delivery to the GPU core in practice this will be way beyond irrelevant unless you're using exotic cooling methods but hey it's there to go along with it there v checkpoints allow you to easily monitor key card voltages if you're performing mods and want to use a dedicated multimedia rather than some multimedia multimeter rather than software to find out how much juice you're giving to key components on the card particularly when you're extreme overclocking their twin vias feature gives you two separate BIOS chips which is good because if you can find your way to get your hands on the non nerfed ln2 bios that allows a power limit over a hundred and nine percent then that might be pretty useful now to be clear guys we benchmarked our card assuming that end users will have to just deal with the stock BIOS but trust me there is more potential this card if you're willing to get a little bit crazy and that dual BIOS implementation means that there's an easy bailout switch if something goes wrong during a BIOS flash triple over voltage that is cranking up the volts to the GPU memory and PLL is all handled separately because of that feature and it is fully supported by nano sized afterburner software but again it will have limited relevance unless you perform the BIOS flash that I was talking about a moment ago because that is going to hold back the true raw potential of this graphics card in a very meaningful way so the conclusion is this the GTX 780 lightning is how you say lightning fast we threw a few games at it from our usual suite of benchmarks and while it doesn't really stand out from the crowd in terms of its performance just as a reminder guys all of our cards are overclocked as high as they can go in my opinion it's really very reasonably priced for 50 dollars more than a reference 780 running at reference clocks and as little as 20 to 30 dollars more than a normal long reference card if nothing else you're getting better build quality and cooler operation for your graphics cards throughout its lifetime it's also aggressively overclocked out of the box at a full 133 megahertz faster max boost clock then a reference GTX 780 and it has no difficulty hitting those numbers consistently while running cooler and still being satisfyingly quiet my only issue with the 780 Lightning actually has nothing to do with MSI but rather to do with Nvidia since it was released the 780 Lightning has been nerfed with that 109 percent power limit bios that I was talking about before versus the aggressive one that it had available to it at launch this practice of Nvidia is where non-approved card designs are limited put some restraints on their partners ability to deliver the best possible performance and while I understand invidious perspective and you know I agree that maintaining a brand image of reliability is more important than three more fps in battlefield in general I wish the the card partners and end-users were allowed to make their own choice and forgo warranty coverage if they really want to push things to the limit I mean I guess the really extreme guys still can if they go and find BIOS mods but I just wish it was a little bit easier anyway guys thanks for watching this review of the msi geforce gtx 780 lightning don't forget to like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment and let me know what you think would you spend an extra twenty to fifty dollars knowing that your card is going to run cooler and it's going to look better and it's going to last longer or is that not worth it to you do you upgrade so often that it doesn't really matter and then finally guys as always don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos