so today we have a pretty cool product this is the MSI GeForce GTX 480
lightning now there haven't been a whole lot of nonreference GTX 480s but this is
definitely as non-reference as they come it uses a custom cooler so this is a
twin frozer 3 now please note that all
of the other GTX 480s that I'm aware of that come with aftermarket air coolers
are triple slot this one is dual slot
and even with a dual slot cooler they've achieved better cooling than the stock
heat sink it also features their power four architecture which is power for
extreme overclocking including a 16 phase pwm which can provide yeah it's
okay so it's double the phases of a reference GTX 480 and in order to
deliver a ton of power to it you've actually got two eight pin connectors
and one six pin connector for power you've got
proyer hm features incredible capacitance and czy low ESR
so to optimize the power supply for extreme overclocking oh okay cool all
right we've got copper Moss all right so new generation mosfet with built-in heat
spreader that's pretty cool too we've got the super farite chokes High SE cap
this is all military class stuff here as well as all solid caps triple over
voltage which we first saw with the hawk the GTX 460 Hawk Edition and then we
also have lightning power layer which is a unique PCB design for the GPU memory
and and power layer eliminates power increases power supply stability and
eliminates power noise and ripple all right so there lots and lots of layers
all right let's keep going down here where we have dual 9 cm pwm fans at it's
90 mm dual formin one heat sinks so dual
form one heat sinks cover on the front and rear of the PCB to di oh okay I
think they mean it has a front and a back plate and then you've also got like
a unisync here so you've got uh cooling for the vrm as well as the memory
superpipe technology which means big fat
thick heat pipes high density fins and a nickel plated copper base wow that took
a long time fortunately the back doesn't really say anything that the front
didn't already tell us and we can finally get this guy opened up now there
aren't a whole lot of these made so you can consider this basically
like limited edition all right comes in a huge box as
you've proba already noticed and let's have a look at what accessories we get
with the GTX 480 lightning first we get
a six pin to 8 Pin adapter okay that's PCI Express power
another six pin to 8 Pin adapter and then a dual Molex to six pit adapter
mind you if you don't have a power supply that's already capable of
powering this card then you need to re-evaluate your build priorities here
are the plugins for the voltage checkpoints and then we also have a DVI
to VGA adapter as well as another oh no rather yeah DVI to VGA and DVI to HDMI
go ahead put that back in there this card is heavy wow all right we got some
bubble wrap in there down here we looks like we have a CD some sort that you'll
probably throw away oh here wow it actually comes with an HDMI cable look
at that okay it comes with the after burer software as well as the NVIDIA
drivers quick users guide and last but not least lightning series little
template thing all right let's look at
the cards so I'm just going to put this back together so that I can put the card
on here to demo it this thing is
impressive looking so the first thing we see through the
packaging is the back plate that covers
the entire back of the GPU now this is
okay it's non- reference and even nonstandard this PCB you can see that
the PCB clearly goes higher than the PCI bracket on the
back of the card so you've got an additional it looks like about a 3/4 in
layer here where they've actually H
housed a lot of the interesting features so they've got some components mounted
there they've got all the V check points here and then they have all of the power
plugs also on that little um Riser part
of the PCB itself all right so let's have a look at the cooler this is a dual
slot cooler as I mentioned before and youve we've got about about half of the
back IO plate for rear exhaust so that
means that probably about W probably not much probably about a quarter of the air
flow from this fan here is going to go out the back of the case the rest of it
is going to be released into the case so you can see the ventilation here in the
back and then there's also room for the air to exit and many other parts of the
cooler so you can uh kind of reach down there here you can see the superpipe so
we've got one big long superpipe here and then we have another shorter super
pipe so those are the thick heat pipes and then we also have several regular
heat pipes this uses a PCI Express 16x
interface so that's one of the only standard reference things about this
card all right you can clearly see the unisync here so if you actually removed
the twin frozer three cooler from the top of it you could probably Mount GPU
only blocks and as long as you've got some air flow over the card I'm sure you
could actually run it that way you've got two SLI fingers which means we've
got support for two-way as well as three-way Crossfire nice little MSI logo
here so you can see that the GPU is actually right under there that's why we
do have some ventilation holes here all right we've got more VMS here we've got
more ventilation holes here and what are we actually cooling with this thing I'm
just trying to look under the back plate to see if I can uh I don't think it's
actually cooling anything I think the point of it is more for Aesthetics than
anything else so in terms of connectivity options once again we are
nonstandard we have goldplated connectors and we have a variety of different
flavors we have two DVI connectors one HDMI and one DisplayPort and what else
we got here okay we got more heat pipes up at the top I think I already showed
the top why don't we just get kind of some good angles of the card and you can
uh you can sort of check it out for yourself here actually here oh should
probably remove the uh plastic shroud shouldn't I yeah let's do
that there you go now you can see it better I just completely slipped my
there we go so now you can see the twin frozer 2 in all of its Glory there's the
90 mm fans you can see the aluminum fins
are very dense so what that means to me is that these fans probably have to
generate a pretty good amount of static pressure in order to get satisfactory
cooling on this
card very impressive also large that is all don't
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