MSI's Radeon HD 6970 Lightning is a pimped up version of the original AMD HD 6970 reference design. Not much is left as in the original: PCB layout, cooling, clock frequencies, all have been improved upon. As a result the HD 6970 Lightning is one of the few premium HD 6970 designs on the market. The card offers plenty of features for overclockers, for example voltage measurement points, triple voltage control using MSI Afterburner, DIP switches for enthusiast tweaking and dual BIOS. In terms of performance, MSI is using increased clocks of 940 MHz core and 1375 MHz memory which are among the highest available on any HD 6970 version. As a result the card gains about 7% in performance when compared to the unoverclocked reference design. However, this is not enough to surpass NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 570 which is a few percent faster and less expensive. Other competition for the card exists as the Radeon HD 6950, which lets willing users unlock its disabled shaders which result in the same performance as a normal HD 6970 - at lower cost.
Overall MSI's HD 6970 Lightning is a solid choice when looking at the HD 6970 offering on the market today. Thanks to the reasonable price increase of $10 it is also interesting to potential buyers who would otherwise be looking at reference designs only.