MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Lightning Pictured

[btarunr]

Ahead of its launch, press-shots of the upcoming flagship graphics card of MSI, the OC-series GeForce GTX 980 Ti Lightning, leaked to the web. The pictures reveal a card that MSI threw all its engineering expertise into. It retains the yellow+black design scheme of its predecessors, and is characterized by an even larger Tri-Frozr triple-fan cooling solution. The cooler consists of a large nickel-plated copper base, from which five 8-10 mm thick heat pipes make their way to two dense aluminium fin-stacks, ventilated by a trio of 100 mm spinners.

The cooler only makes up part of this product, a bigger chunk of engineering went into its custom-design 10-layer PCB, with a 15-phase VRM that draws power from a combination of one 6-pin and two 8-pin PCIe power connectors, and a plethora of overclocker-friendly features such as voltage measurement points, dual-BIOS with an LN2-friendly secondary BIOS, the ability to control speeds of individual fans, and more. The MSI GTX 980 Ti ships with a factory-overclock of 1203 MHz core, 1303 MHz GPU Boost, and 7.10 GHz (GDDR5-effective) memory; which certainly isn't the highest factory-OC out of the box, but this is probably MSI's way of inviting users to overclock it to Kingdom come.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[manofthem]

That's a beast card!

 

[Blue-Knight]

MSi, you've just failed one more time.

 

[EzioAs]

MSi, you've just failed one more time.

How so?

 

[PLAfiller]

Rarely I see a back-plate without a single cut out. I am guessing it's ok for the hardware. After all many engineers put their name under the warranty.

 

[micropage7]

wow that lightning hit the aircraft

 

[Devon68]

The yellow decoration on the card spell's OC. I wonder if that was intentional or just a design fluke..

 

[64K]

The yellow decoration on the card spell's OC. I wonder if that was intentional or just a design fluke..

I think it was intentional. It probably adds a little eye candy appeal to people spending big bucks on a good overclocking card.

 

[okidna]

The yellow decoration on the card spell's OC. I wonder if that was intentional or just a design fluke..

Haha just realised that. And yes, I also think it was intentional.

 

[chipootle]

MSi, you've just failed one more time.

What an insightful and informative comment!

 

[peche]

wow that lightning hit the aircraft

i hope that does not announces a upcoming fail ....
the weird thing ... no vents on that backplate.... WTF MSI

 

[natr0n]

yellow as all ways

 

[RMX]

Glad I waited, liking the looks, but will be ditching it anyway for a nice waterblock Let's hope this puppy will OC as good as the 290X Lightning, loved that card and its 1300mhz 24/7 under water OC

 

[rtwjunkie]

i hope that does not announces a upcoming fail ....
the weird thing ... no vents on that backplate.... WTF MSI

No vents on the back of the reference 980 either. Backplates are rarely needed to cool. They have two main uses: 1)Looks, because everyone seems to like them and want them, and 2) to provide SOME extra rigidity, althouugh the merits of this are debatable to how effective it is, especially if backplate is thin plastic.

 

[EarthDog]

No vents on the back of the reference 980 either. Backplates are rarely needed to cool. They have two main uses: 1)Looks, because everyone seems to like them and want them, and 2) to provide SOME extra rigidity, althouugh the merits of this are debatable to how effective it is, especially if backplate is thin plastic.

Yay! Thinking!

 

[awesomesauce]

review: http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/msi-geforce-gtx-980-ti-lightning-review,1.html

kidos to guru3d

 

[terroralpha]

review: http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/msi-geforce-gtx-980-ti-lightning-review,1.html

kidos to guru3d

Original---------------------------This sample-----------------------Overclocked
Core Clock: 1002 MHz------------Core Clock: 1203 MHz-------------Core Clock 1268 MHz
Boost Clock: 1076 MHz-----------Boost Clock: 1304 MHz------------Boost Clock: 1480~1500 MHz
Memory Clock: 7012 MHz--------Memory Clock: 7096 MHz---------Memory Clock: 8694 MHz

i have doubts that the memory is stable at those speeds. when i try going over 7800 MHz on any of my cards, i start getting artifacts, graphics glitches like random shit flashing here and there. it'll run without crashing in excess of 8000MHz but it's not pretty.

 

[rtwjunkie]

i have doubts that the memory is stable at those speeds. when i try going over 7800 MHz on any of my cards, i start getting artifacts, graphics glitches like random shit flashing here and there. it'll run without crashing in excess of 8000MHz but it's not pretty.

But don't forget, it wouldn't be surprising to learn that they selectively bin and test for the highest quality chips for something like this.

 

[Zeki]

But don't forget, it wouldn't be surprising to learn that they selectively bin and test for the highest quality chips for something like this.

They must be doing that because my reference GTX980ti does only 1408MHz on watercooling. They kept their worst chips for reference design cards. Regardless of voltage/power/memory overclocking it won't go higher. It might be related to ASIC quality selection.

 

[EarthDog]

Is that ACTUAL boost clocks or what gpuz says?

 

[Zeki]

Is that ACTUAL boost clocks or what gpuz says?

Max boost clock, read by MSI afterburner (much lower than 1408 in GPUZ)

 

[johnspack]

Wow, very affordable too, only 900+can: http://www.ncix.com/category/amd-nvidia-gpu-geforce-gtx-980-ti-49-108-2060.htm No wonder 970s are still 450 up here. I'm going to be stuck with this 480 forever.....