MSI maintained the R7970 Lightning as its flagship AMD Radeon graphics card from March, even after AMD launched the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition in June. The company finally decided to combine its R7970 Lightning board with the new "Tahiti XT2" Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition ASIC, creating the R7970 Lightning Boost Edition (BE). While the original R7970 Lightning shipped with 1070 MHz core and 5.60 GHz memory, the new R7970 Lightning BE ships with 1070 MHz core, 1150 MHz PowerTune Boost, and 6.00 GHz memory (288 GB/s). It packs 3 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 384-bit wide memory interface.

Most other features remain the same. The R7970 Lightning BE packs an enthusiast-grade 17-phase VRM, dual-BIOS, voltage-conditioning GPU Reactor module, and TwinFrozr IV cooling solution. Quite shockingly, MSI didn't take the opportunity to address the lack of dual-link DVI connectors in the original R7970 Lightning, the Lightning BE continues to have two single-link DVI, and four mini-DisplayPort connectors. The new R7970 Lightning BE could displace the original from its US $499.99 price-point.