The Card

MSI's cooler uses a mix of black and gold as the color theme. Some checkerboard pattern surfaces add highlights. The other side has a nice looking backplate that's made from a material similar to carbon-fibre. With 33.0 x 14.5 cm, the card is huge and might not fit into some smaller cases.


The card has fully adjustable RGB lighting on the sides and the back.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three standard DisplayPort 1.4a, one HDMI 2.0b, and a VirtualLink connector, which is basically USB-C with DisplayPort routing and USB-PD, so a single cable can power, display, and take input from your VR HMD.

NVIDIA has updated their display engine with the Turing microarchitecture, which now supports DisplayPort 1.4a with support for VESA's nearly lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC). Combined, this enables support for 8K@30Hz with a single cable, or 8K@60Hz when DSC is turned on. For context, DisplayPort 1.4a is the latest version of the standard that was published in April, 2018.

At CES 2019, NVIDIA announced that all their graphics cards will now support VESA Adaptive Sync (aka FreeSync). While only a small number of FreeSync monitors have been fully qualified for G-SYNC, users can enable the feature in NVIDIA's control panel, no matter whether the monitor is certified or not.


The board uses three 8-pin power connectors. This input configuration is specified for up to 525 watts of power draw.


With Turing, NVIDIA is using NVLink as a physical layer for its next-generation SLI technology. NVLink provides sufficient bandwidth for multi-GPU rendering at 8K 60 Hz, 4K 120 Hz, and other such bandwidth-heavy display resolutions. It's a point-to-point link between your GPUs, and so, latencies will be lower compared to pushing data through the PCI-Express bus.


MSI has added a dual-BIOS feature on their Lightning. The second BIOS is optimized for liquid nitrogen usage.


Near the back of the card, you'll find four ports to measure important voltages of the card using a DMM.


The front side has a little OLED display that plays back some animations by default, but can be customized to show parameters like temperatures—or your own animations.

Disassembly

MSI's massive heatsink uses nice heatpipes and a ton of fin area to move heat away from the GPU chip.


Once the main cooler is removed, a black die-cast baseplate becomes visible. It covers the whole card and provides cooling for memory chips and VRM circuitry.


The backplate is made from some kind of carbon compound with epoxy. It's definitely not metal and definitely not plastic. I tried scratching it, and it doesn't scratch like either of those metals. Also, I measured its resistance, which is very low with 5 ohms. Please note the heatpipe that has been embedded into the backplate, which could slightly improve cooling. I tested the card without the backplate and temperatures are less than 1°C higher.


If you plan on disassembling the Lightning yourself, be aware of this delicate flat ribbon cable which connects the OLED screen to the PCB. You remove the cable by flipping the black part of the connector upward as indicated in the second image—don't just try to pull out the cable.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.