The Card

MSI's new Lightning comes with the company's Twin Frozr III thermal solution. The new version adds blue colored fan blades and a dust removal system.


The card requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity is two DVI ports, one full size HDMI port and one full size DisplayPort output. Due to NVIDIA's display output logic design you are limited to two active displays at any time. AMD GPUs have a more flexible configuration and allow up to six active outputs at the same time.

An HDMI sound device is included in the GPU, too. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes HD audio and support for Blu-ray 3D movies. The DisplayPort interface is DisplayPort 1.2 compliant which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.


You may combine up to four GTX 580 cards from any vendor in a multi-GPU SLI configuration.


Pictured above are photos of the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.