MSI 5870 LIGHTING

The MSI R5870 Lightning is one of the very few Radeon HD 5800 series cards to feature a custom design. It’s not just the cooler; MSI has gone all out and built this card right up from a custom PCB to components of top-notch quality that meet military standards.

Features
The PCB of this card measures 10.1 inches which is just about half an inch less than the length of the reference PCB. But it’s wider by three-fourth of an inch to accommodate the extra components used for the 12-phase power design for the GPU and 3-phase power design for memory. MSI has used Hi-C capacitors instead of solid-state capacitors all over which they claim have 8 times the lifespan, lower operating temperature and are more efficient. The reference design features a pair of 6-pin PCIe power connectors, but this card uses two 8-pin PCIe connectors to feed the additional circuitry and provide extra power to the GPU for better stability while overclocking. If you’re not overclocking, you can use a 6-pin PCIe connector with one of the 8-pin sockets.

There are check points for measuring the core and memory voltages with a multi-meter near the power inputs. The R5870 Lightning comes factory-overclocked to 900 MHz which is 50 MHz faster than the stock speed. But the memory is left running at stock speed (1200 MHz). The package includes a two 6-pin to 8-pin PCIe adapters, two header cables for check points and an HDMI cable. The driver disc has MSI’s benchmarking and stress test tool called Kombustion and an overclocking tool called AfterBurner.

The cooling system installed on this card is brilliant. An aluminium heat spreader with thermal pad underneath dissipates heat evenly from the memory chips and power circuitry. The GPU is cooled by an enormous cooler that MSI calls Twin Frozr II. It comprises four copper heatpipes that dissipate heat from the copper base to the aluminium fins. The pipes running through the ends of the fins are thicker and the ones running through the mid-section are slightly leaner. Two 75 mm variable speed fans keep the heatsink cool. These fans are absolutely silent when the card is idle and aren’t distractingly loud at full load unlike the cooler on the reference design.

The rear panel of the R5870 Lightning looks exactly the same as that of the reference design, except that the connectors are gold plated. There are two DVI port, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort.

Excellent cooler Silent fans HDMI cable included High-quality components used A slightly overclocked core is completely pointless

Specifications
GPU: Radeon HD 5870; Core | Memory speed: 900 MHz | 1200 MHz; Video memory: 1 GB GDDR5; Memory bus width: 256-bit; DirectX support: 11; Video outputs: 2x DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort.

Test Rig
Our test rig ran the Intel Core i5-655K on the MSI H57M-ED65 motherboard fitted with 4 GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1600 memory and an 80 GB Intel X25-M SSD. We use Windows 7 Ultimate and the ATI Catalyst driver used was version 10.5.

Performance
We compared the performance of this card to a standard Radeon HD 5870 running at stock speed. At 1920x1200 with visual effects set to maximum (enthusiast mode) and 4xAA Crysis Warhead ran at a smooth 32 fps and looked gorgeous with highly detailed environment, water and explosions. Race Driver Grid ran without any hiccups with all effects set to maximum and 8xAA at 1920x1080. Just Cause 2 ran at 67 fps at 1920x1080 with effects set to very high and AA disabled.
The HD 5870 is one powerful GPU but a slight boost in core speed doesn’t offer any benefit although the big, bold numbers look good. It delivers merely 2 to 4 fps in most games which is pointless. We further overclocked the GPU to 950 MHz and the memory to 1300 MHz, but yet pointless. Even a standard HD 5870 can be overclocked to the speed at which this card runs using the ATI Overdrive control panel in the display driver.

Verdict
We say the MSI R5870 Lightning is an improvised stock HD 5870 with features such as Hi-C capacitors, better cooler, 15-phase power design, factory-overclocked GPU, and bundled overclocking and benchmarking utilities and an HDMI cable. These features certainly guarantee better stability and greater lifespan but note that you won’t get better frame rates. Priced at Rs 24,500 this card commands a premium of Rs 2,000 for the ample number of additional features it offers which we feel is justified.