Gadgetory

so today we have a pretty cool product this is the msi geforce gtx 480 lightning now there haven't been a whole lot of non reference GTX 480 s but this is definitely as non-reference as they come it uses a custom cooler so this is a twin frozer 3 now please note that all of the other GTX 480 s that I'm aware of that come with aftermarket air coolers are triple slot this one is dual slot and even with a dual slot cooler they've achieved better cooling than the stock heatsink it also features their power for architecture which is power for extreme overclocking including a 16 phase PWM which can provide yeah it's okay so it's double the phases of a reference GTX 480 and in order to deliver a ton of power to it you've actually got to eight pin connectors and one six pin connector for power you've got Pro adelies er hmm features incredible capacitance and crazy low ESR so optimize the power supply for extreme overclocking okay cool all right we've got copper moss alright so now you generation MOSFET with built-in heat spreader that's pretty cool too we've got the super ferrite chokes hi-c cap this is all military class stuff here as well as all solid caps triple over voltage which we first saw with the hawk the GTX 460 hawk Edition and then we also have lightning power layer which is unique PCB design for the GPU memory and power layer eliminates power increases power supply stability and eliminates power noise and ripple alright so there are lots and lots of layers all right let's keep going down here where we have dual nine centimeter pwm fans at is 90 millimeter dual form in one heat sinks so good dual form one heat sinks cover on the front and rear the PCB to dip okay I think they mean it has a front and a back plate and then you've also got like a uni thing here so you've got cooling for the vrm as well as the memory superpipe technology which means big fat thick heat pipes high density fins and a nickel plated copper base while that took a long time I'm fortunately the back doesn't really say anything that the front didn't already tell us and we can finally get this guy opened up now there aren't a whole lot of these made so you can consider this basically a like limited edition all right comes in a huge box as you've probably already noticed and let's have a look at what accessories we get with the GTX 480 lightning first we get a six pin to eight pin adapter okay that's PCI Express power another six pin to eight pin adapter and then a dual molex to 6-pin adapter mind you if you don't have a power supply that's already capable of powering this card then you need to reevaluate your build priorities here are the plugins for the voltage check points and then we also have a DVI to VGA adapter as well as another oh nope brother yeah DVI to VGA and DVI to HDMI this card is heavy Wow alright got some bubble wrap in there down here we looks like we have a CD some sort that you'll probably throw away oh here wow it actually comes with an HDMI cable look at that okay that comes with the afterburner software as well as the Nvidia drivers quick user's guide and last but not least a lightning series little pamphlet thing alright let's look at the card so I'm just going to put this back together then I can put the part on here to demo it this thing is impressive looking so the first thing we see through the packaging is the backplate that covers the entire back of the GPU now this is okay it's non-reference and even non-standard this PCB you can see that the PCB clearly goes higher than the PCI bracket on the back of the card so you've got an additional looks like about a 3/4 inch layer here where they'd actually I housed a lot of the interesting features so we've got some components mounted there they've got all the V checkpoints here and then they have all of the power plugs also on that Rizer part of the PCB itself all right so let's have a look at the cooler this is a dual slot cooler as I mentioned before and you've got about about half of the back IO plate for rear exhaust so that means that probably about probably not much probably about 1/4 the airflow from this fan here is going to go out the back of the case the rest of it is going to be released into the case so you can see the ventilation here in the back and then there's also room for the air to exit and many other parts of the cooler so you can kind of reach down there here you can see the super pipe so we've got one big long super pipe here and then we have another shorter super pipe so those are the thick heat pipes and then we also have several regular heat pipes this uses a PCI Express 16x interface so that's one of the only standard reference things about this card all right you can clearly see the unison here so if you actually removed the Twin Frozr three cooler from the top of it you could probably mount GPU only blocks and as long as you've got some airflow over the card I'm sure you could actually run it that way you've got two sli fingers which means we've got support for two-way as well as 3-way crossfire there's a nice little MSI logo here so you can see that the GPU is actually right under there that's why we do have some ventilation holes here all right we've got some more VRMs here we've got more ventilation holes here and what are we actually cooling with this thing I'm just trying to look under the backplate to see if I can I don't think it's actually cooling anything I think the point of it is more for aesthetics than anything else so in terms of connectivity options you once again we are non-standard we have gold plated connectors and we have a variety of different flavors we have two DVI connectors one HDMI and one DisplayPort and what else we got here okay we got more heat pipes up at the top I think I already showed the top one we just got kind of some good angles of the card and you cannot you can sort of check it out for yourself here actually here Oh you should probably remove the plastic shroud right yeah that there you go now you can see it better and completely slipped my mind there we go so now you can see the Twin Frozr - and all of its glory there's the 90 millimeter fans you can see the aluminum fans are very dense so what that means to me is that these fans probably have to generate a pretty good amount of static pressure in order to get satisfactory cooling on this card very impressive also large that is all don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips