MSI's Radeon HD 7970 Lightning is a beautfully engineered custom implementation of the AMD HD 7970. It shows what can be achieved when focusing on pure performance and overclocking potential. Thanks to the increased clock speeds out of the box the HD 7970 Lightning sees an 8% performance lead over the reference HD 7970. Unfortunately this is still not enough to fight off NVIDIA's GTX 680 which offers the same performance up to 1920x1200. At 2560x1600 NVIDIA's GTX 680 is weaker, which is caused by NVIDIA's card being slower at that resolution, not by the Lightning being faster. Also you have to consider that the GTX 680 is just the basic reference design, not a specially crafted high performance version.
This review introduces multi-monitor testing at 5760x1080, here the HD 7970 Lightning makes short shrift of the GTX 680 thanks to AMD's flawless Eyefinity implementation. NVIDIA's Surround failed in many of our games and delivers lower performance in most of the cases where it works.
Unfortunately not everything is gold with the MSI HD 7970 Lightning. Boosting the card's performance resulted in massively increased power consumption, which generates heat that has to go somewhere. In games the cooler has to work extra hard, resulting in excessive fan noise, making it one of the noisiest cards I ever reviewed.
The most frustrating problem for me was the lack of a dual-link DVI monitor connection on the HD 7970 Lightning. The two DVI ports only provide a single link each, which is not good enough for our test resolution of 2560x1600. 2560x1440 or any 3D at 120 Hz won't work either. In order to connect a dual-link DVI monitor to the Lightning, one has to purchase an active DisplayPort to DVI adapter, which costs around $100. I had to buy four different adapters before I found one that worked - most of the time. I was still plagued by intermittent link failures and black screens which would spoil any serious gaming experience. I strongly advise against trying to use this card with a dual-link DVI monitor. Either buy a monitor which has DisplayPort, or get a different graphics card. The added cost of $100 alone should be enough motivation for you. ASUS has solved this problem by adding a switch chip to their cards which is controlled by the dual BIOS selection. I hope MSI considers such a feature for their future cards.
Price-wise it is very hard to justify the $520 of the MSI HD 7970 Lightning, when compared to NVIDIA's GTX 680 at $499, or cheaper HD 7970s at $450. For the typical gamer the GTX 680 is clearly the better choice. It is cheaper, faster, quieter, cooler, less power hungry and connects to all monitors without any adapter trickery. On the other hand doing hardcore overclocking with the GTX 680 is boring, limited and complex. MSI's HD 7970 Lightning offers the full package here with extensive clock and voltage control, thanks to the wonderful Afterburner overclocking software. The beefed up voltage regulation and reactor core will also help fame-seekers gain the extra advantage over the competition.