Introduction

Last year AMD released their new Radeon HD 5800 Series of graphics cards which quickly became a big success due to the numerous improvements made over previous generations. Up to now all cards available from all manufacturers were reference design cards which means they were all made to the same specifications, using the same components and then a sticker was added on the cooler depending on the AIB.

MSI's latest member to the Lightning Series comes with a completely redesigned PCB and uses their famous TwinFrozr cooler. It also uses an increased amount of PWM phases and two 8-pin PCIe power connectors to promise more overclocking potential.

MSI has slightly increased the clock speeds on their design to 900/1200 up from 850/1200 on the reference design.

Packaging

MSI's packaging has a sexy F22-Raptor on the front - this will certainly draw some attention on a store shelf. On the back you find further details about the product.

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + Quick Install Guide
• Long CrossFire bridge
• DVI to VGA adapter
• 2x PCIe power 6-pin to 8-pin
• HDMI cable
• 3x voltage measurement adapter

The Card

The most notable feature, after the cooler, is that MSI has extended the PCB of the card making it stick out a few cm under the cooler. This allows better routing of the signals on the PCB and should still fit all cases.


Just like the reference design, the card occupies two slots in the system.


The card has two DVI ports, one HDMI port, and one DisplayPort. This is just one of many output configurations that are possible on the new cards, thanks to the overhauled display output logic. Basically the card can drive six TMDS signals that can be combined in any way (a dual-link DVI consumes two TMDS lines).

For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.


Crossfire configurations are supported to improve performance even further.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.