MSI's GeForce GTX 480 Lightning delivers the most complete feature set targeted at overclockers available today. The card offers software voltage control for up to three voltages, combined with MSI's Afterburner overclocking tool, this makes overclocking easier than before. Also, the inclusion of voltage measurement points and a dual BIOS which comes preloaded with a configuration optimized for liquid nitrogen use is testament to MSI's focus on overclocking with this card. In our testing we saw decent overclocking potential on air, which is clearly better than what the NVIDIA reference design could do. With added voltage this can be expanded a bit more. Personally I think MSI's out of the box clocks of 750 / 1000 MHz seem a bit low for what the card can do, almost forcing users to do overclocking themselves, to maximize their investment.
The GTX 480 Lightning is still a GF100 based card, which means it is plagued by the massive power consumption of NVIDIA's GPU. It seems that this is also reason for holding back on higher overclocks. With all the hype around MSI's Lightning I would have expected more overclocking potential. MSI did do a great job reducing the power consumption in idle, Blu-ray and average 3D which certainly helps the card. In terms of fan settings MSI also managed to improve on the NVIDIA reference design. Idle noise is comparable to AMD's Radeon HD 5870. Under load the card emits about half the noise of the GTX 480 reference - but is still far from being a quiet card.
For pricing, MSI quoted us a very reasonable $549, but time will tell if the card can really be offered at this price on the market. If you are an extreme overclocker for the NVIDIA platform, with a good supply of LN2 and the urge to tweak video cards to the max, the GTX 480 Lightning should be your weapon of choice. As normal user who just wants to run games, there seem to be better alternatives out there.