MSI did a lot more than showing off its AMD Fusion "Brazos" Wind U270 notebook at today's press-meet in Taiwan. The company seems to have spilled its entire load for CES, just days ahead of it. Today's exposé included two new ultra-high end graphics cards under the company's Lightning series. The R6970 Lightning is based on AMD Radeon HD 6970, and the N580GTX Lightning, of course, on NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580.

Both cards look nearly identical because their most peculiar part, the cooling assembly, is mostly the same. The Twin Frozr III from MSI combines slick looks with certain enhancements with the fan blade design (to improve noise to airflow ratio). Under the shroud is what looks to be a dense aluminum fin array to which heat is conveyed using several heat-pipes, including 8 mm thick ones. While the cooler more or less respects the 2-slot width, it increases the height of the cards by a good inch.The PCBs of both the R6970 and N580GTX are surprisingly similar in component layout. The N580GTX uses a 16-phase VRM with power drawn from two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors, while the R6970 uses a beefier 18-phase VRM. Both cards seem to be making use of high-grade components such as high-C capacitors and proadlizers to condition power, there's a good chance that they're using MSI's solid-state chokes that don't whine on load.

The N580GTX Lightning features display connectivity that includes two DVI, and one each of HDMI and DisplayPort, while the R6970 Lightning uses an AMD standard loadout of two DVI, one HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort. Both cards might feature factory-overclocked speeds with large overclocking headroom, including voltage control to help you out. More can be learned at CES. MSI's pre-preview is getting exciting so far.