MSI's GeForce GTX 770 Lightning is a 1:1 clone of the GTX 680 Lightning we reviewed last year. It looks exactly the same but uses the GTX 770 GPU (it is GK104 as well) and comes with faster 7 Gbps GDDR5 memory chips NVIDIA introduced with the GeForce GTX 770. MSI has overclocked their card out of the box with one of the largest factory overclocks available to GTX 770 cards at this time. Unfortunately, memory is not overclocked, which would have been easy given the massive headroom in our manual OC testing. As a result, the card has a 6% performance lead over the reference design when averaged out over all of our benchmarks. AMD's single GPU flagship, the HD 7970 GHz Edition, is 9% behind.
MSI was smart to reuse their GTX 680 Lightning design to nullify R&D costs while keeping a design that we love. The cooler looks powerful and menacing thanks to the yellow highlights. The card is a bit large but should fit most cases. Two large fans on the cooler keep the card comfortably cool--cooler than other GTX 770 cards we tested before. Noise levels are comparable to the reference design cooler--slightly higher in idle and slightly lower under load, but the difference is small. I wish MSI had reduced noise levels a bit more by using some of the available temperature headroom, but they probably focused on lower temperatures since this card focuses on overclockers, and they might prefer such a configuration. I'm currently also testing the MSI GTX 770 GAMING that comes with greatly improved noise levels, so stay tuned.
Overclocking on our sample worked very well. Better than on other GTX 770 cards, MSI's Lightning reached both highest clocks and highest overclocked performance. MSI is promoting voltage control on the Lightning but the range is extremely limited with a +0.012 V maximum increase. Definitely not worth the effort.
MSI's card also comes with the GPU Reactor, an extra PCB that sits on the back of the GPU to provide additional voltage filtering. I'm not sure if it has any real effect on overclocking, but it takes up some additional space, which could become an issue on SLI with motherboards that have short slot spacing only. Most people should be fine, though.
Pricing of the GTX 770 Lightning is $450, which is $50 more than the reference design. I find this increase to be a bit much when compared to other GTX 770 custom designs. A price of $420 would have been more reasonable. Still, the GTX 770 Lightning is a great card that can easily compete with the latest models of other board partners.