MSI has sucessfully taken the already great NVIDIA GTX 680 reference design and improved on it to give it that unique Lightning touch. Thanks to a large overclock out of the box the card is one of the fastest GTX 680 cards currently available. Its 100 MHz base clock increase can result in a 5% performance boost when compared to the NVIDIA reference design. Manual overclocking works great, too, and is paired with MSI's excellent Afterburner overclocking software. On our card, we saw the highest GTX 680 GPU clock of all our reviews, reaching 1225 MHz, which is much higher than other GTX 680s we tested so far, which usually reached in the 1150 MHz range. Memory overclocking does not work so well on the other hand, not being able to break 1800 MHz, which most other cards can do just fine.
MSI's large dual-fan TwinFrozr cooler enables the card to be a dual-slot GTX 680 beast, other manufacturers need three slots here. The GTX 680 Lightning does extend beyond the top edge of the card, and the GPU reactor takes up some space on the back, so make sure it will fit your system. Noise levels of the cooler were much lower than the NVIDIA reference design, the card is the lowest noise GTX 680 together with the triple slot ASUS GT 680 DC II. However, given the low temperatures I feel like a bit less noise under load would have been possible, especially since the card is certainly not that quiet during gaming.
MSI has also added some features geared toward more advanced overclockers like Dual BIOS and voltage measurement points. The second BIOS on the card is for LN2 extreme overclockers, but it can also serve as backup in case a BIOS flash goes wrong, to recover the card.
Price-wise MSI says the card will retail between $569 and $599. We will see what the final cost will be, but either way it feels quite high. Even at $499, GTX 680 is not exactly a steal, especially with many GTX 670 variants offering similar performance at a much better pricing. AMD will also be releasing their HD 7970 GHz Edition very soon, which might shift the power balance in this segment, and lead to more affordable pricing.