The Card

MSI's GeForce GTX 580 Lightning uses an upscaled version of the Twin Frozr III cooler that we have seen on other MSI cards before. As you can see on the second picture, the "lip" of the cooler extends a bit further than the edge of the PCB which seems unnecessary and might complicate installation in smaller cases.


The card requires two slots in your system.


The card has two DVI ports (one single-link, one dual-link), one full size HDMI port and two mini-DisplayPort outputs. AMD's display output logic is clearly superior to what NVIDIA has to offer at this time. Vendors are free to combine six TMDS links into any output configuration they want (dual-link DVI consuming two links) - and use them all at the same time. AMD has also introduced DisplayPort 1.2 support with their new cards which allows the use of a DisplayPort hub to connect multiple monitors, or daisy chain them together.

An HDMI sound device is also included in the GPU. The HDMI interface is HDMI 1.4a compatible which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 7.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit output. The new revision also brings support for Blu-ray 3D movies which will become important later this year when we will see first Blu-ray 3D titles shipping.


You may combine up to four HD 69xx cards from any vendor in CrossFire.


Here are the front and the back of the card, 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.