It looks like MSI's beating the drums about military-grade superiority of its N260GTX Lightning over its competitors has finally come to bear some fruit. Renowned enthusiast hipro5 from Greece set a new GPU core clock-speed record for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, with a stress-stable 1100 MHz, with its shader domain clocked at 2205 MHz. Aided with an Intel Core i7 975 XE clocked at 5.57 GHz (HTT disabled, 4 GB DDR3 memory clocked at 2064 MHz DDR), the bench stood Aquamark with scores of 392,063 points (GPU score: 71,955, CPU: 40,070). The score validation can be found here The memory of the graphics card remained at its stock frequency of 999 MHz. The same bench at slightly lower speeds of 1070/2205/999 MHz (core/shader/memory), ran 3DMark03 stable, scoring 73461 points. The stock cooler of the N260GTX however, was excluded from this feat. The HWBot record reveals that the graphics card was cooled using a liquid-nitrogen (LN2) cooler.

Leader in graphics card cooling technology, MSI International is always inventing new, better thermal designs to give our customers the most efficient products. Launched today, the N285GTX SuperPipe 2G is not only powered by one of the most powerful GPU in the market - the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 - but also adds an amazing 2GB GDDR3 RAM, and utilizes MSI's exclusive SuperPipe and Twin Frozr thermal design. This card dominates the market with peak performance in both graphics and cooling efficiency.

The N285GTX SuperPipe 2G is one of the most powerful cards equipped MSI SuperPipe technology. The heatpipe on a graphics card is a very important component which is responsible for dissipating heat away from the GPU to the surrounding fins. The thicker the heatpipe, the faster the heat can flow to allow better cooling. MSI SuperPipe technology is using 8mm thick heatpipe that is 60% thicker than the traditional heatpipes, and improves the cooling by 90%. With such performance, there is no doubt that MSI SuperPipe technology is perfect thermal solution for high-end graphics cards.

MSI releases two GeForce GTX 260 video cards today - MSI N260GTX Lightning, and N260GTX Lightning Black Edition. First introduced at Cebit 2009, MSI N260GTX Lightning has twice the standard GeForce GTX 260 GDDR3 memory - 1792 MB, utilizes a Twin Frozr cooling with heatpipes, dual slot heatsink and two big fans. The card is reported to utilize 10 Phase PWM design, where 8 phases are reserved for the GPU and 2 phases for the memory.
There are two versions of the card, that are essentially the same, but differ only from the bundle package. The better version N260GTX Lightning Black Edition is paired with the company's AirForce Panel, an external touch panel that can change the card's voltages and clock speeds on the fly. It is not included in the Lightning edition. Detailed information on the clock speeds of both cards is below.

But wait, that's not all from MSI for today. The company also made public the release of the N260GTX Lightning video card. This NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 based card features 1792 MB of DDR3 memory, dual fan design and an exclusive "AirForce Panel" with touch buttons for instant overclocking and voltage regulation.

MSI is said to be readying a custom graphics card called the N260GTX Lightning, based on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 GPU. There is currently no word on clock speeds but one would expect this card to come factory overclocked. The graphics card has a custom red PCB, featuring 8+2 phase power, 5000 hour capacitors, 1792 MB of GDDR3, D-Sub, DVI and DisplayPort or HDMI and a dual slot, dual fan cooler, featuring 5 heatpipes. MSI will also be bundling an AirForce panel which appears to allow on the fly adjustments to core and memory voltage, core, shader and memory clock speeds, as well as profile selection and brightness and contrast adjustments. The MSI N260GTX Lightning is expected to make its first official appearance at CeBIT 2009.