welcome to my unboxing and first look at pretty much the baller GTX 680 out there
at this point in time this is the MSI lightning edition featuring unlocked
digital power yes uh threeyear warranty as well but yes lightning edition cards
have triple over voltage which means that unlike regular Kepler video cards
that is to say everyone's Kepler video cards except MSI power edition cards
lightning edition cards or any cards that feature their triple over voltage
technology uh wait so the other ones cannot overvolt the GPU cannot so your
overclocking will always be limited MSI has unlocked that capability allowing
you to like break world records and more importantly than Breaking World Records
just actually get all the performance that you can get out of your video card
so you this one's got oh yeah GPU reactor as well which is more for
subzero overclocking but I'll show you guys that after unlocked BIOS to remove
all protections including active phase switching uh over current protection and
thermal design power restrictions bam
remove it all enhan power design giving you two times the power output 12 phase
pwm design independent memory power and lightning power layer whatever that
means but it's probably an additional layer to the PCB or something for cleaner signaling digital pwm controller
for more precise voltage control etc etc most of the other cards don't even need
this stuff because you can't overvolt them anyway 3x3 OC kit so with v
checkpoints so you can manually check voltages with a multimeter triple over
voltage and triple temp monitor so you can monitor the GPU the memory and the
vrm with afterburner afterburner by the way is my favorite video card
overclocking software Bar None it's just the best um okay all military class
three components you got your copper Moss High SE caps golden solid state
chokes and dark solid caps I mean I think that's a bit of a you know okay
okay you don't need you know a gold layer on your solid state chok but looks
baller so whatever dust removal Technologies included with the twin twin
frozer 4 cooler it's got super pipes dual 10 cm pwm fans high density fins
which are good and bad it depends uh dual form in one heat sinks you know
what let's go ahead and get this baby opened up this is uh this is a card that
I've been very excited to have a look at here so in terms of accessories you got
waa a bunch of stuff um okay so you got a couple six pin to 8
Pin PCIe power connectors you got your V checkpoint cables so you can adapt those
out to something that's compatible with your multimeter got VGA or DVI to VGA
adapter but get rid of that long flexible black SLI Bridge the very best
kind as well as a certificate of working
quality and stability uh quick users guide drivers that you should throw away
and download the latest from the NVIDIA website
and the beastly card itself so let's
just uh put this back together no that okay I don't need
that uh yeah yeah don't worry I'm going to do that for sure okay Slick's just
gesturing to me mostly obscene gestures
but it's okay I forgive him I give him a
hard time about things so you he's got to get back at me every once in a while
all right lightning card Oh I thought this one had three power connectors I in
fact I even said it did in another video but don't mind me this has two PCIe 8
Pin power connectors two 10 cm fans and
these are actually deeper fans than I'm used to seeing on video cards as well
they have a bit more well depth to them they're also using their propeller
blades which are more efficient blades and they have these plastic tips at the
end that are supposed to reduce noise increase efficiency and uh generally be
better it will spin this way on Startup which will pull some of the air out
that's you know lodged into the heat sink out of it before it turns on which
should in theory keep the heat sink
pretty much dust free as long as you power cycle your computer every once in a while and I've seen this work in
action with actually not an MSI card but with one of their competitor's cards
that features this counter rotating boot up technology so it'll be a little loud
at the start but you know don't be phased by that it's all good it'll uh
it'll it'll quiet down as soon as it starts spinning the right way huge
cooling potential check this out so the radiator fins the aluminum fins go all
the way from here all the way down to here all the way to the back of the card
that isn't an enormous cooler for a
single GPU I mean that amount of surface area could probably be handling a dual
GPU graphics card at this point super pipes are also included see that's these
thicker heat pipes here that are carrying the heat much further away from
the GPU core itself right there there's a GK 104 Graphics core that's the Kepler
GPU that's featured in all the high-end graphics cards 670s 680s 690s all that
good stuff you've also got okay this is one of the most uh rigid cards I've
encountered you can see it has almost no flex to it no matter what I do and
that's for a couple of reasons number one they've got a unisyn covering the
vrm and the memory components check that
out thick metal all the way here all the
way up here giving it an amazing amount of structural rigidity all the way here
there's those golden uh golden guys right there Golden Girls Golden Years
Wonder Years I don't know where I'm going with this and it also has a full
back plate so there's a little bit of ventilation hole going on here around
the pwm as well as just you know General
back Pless more better so this is GP reactor you don't have to keep it on you
can take it off if you want but what it does is it basically builds more com
more components into the very back of the GPU then they would otherwise
physically be able to fit just as a little addin daughter board so like I
said you take it off if you want you can leave it on if you want it's more useful
for subzero and extreme overclocking and no I want to put it back on I think he's
G me a hard time about this you're failing well yeah I'm failing at it but
I'll succeed see all right you can actually Orient this however you want as
well so I'm going to do it this way cuz once it's installed I want everything to
be right side up MSI lightning there's also blue LEDs behind it that look
pretty cool as well be noted that the improper installation of GPU reactor
card may cause damage to the graphics card yeah that stands to reason so PCI
Express 3.0 um data connector two SLI
connectors for up to four-way SLI functionality if you had four of these
in one system even I would be jealous at that point to be perfectly honest uh
supports up to three plus one displays so you got dual DVI HDMI and display
port out on the back of the card little bit of ventilation coming out the back but this is by and large an internal uh
exhaust card and that color scheme oh my
goodness because we actually recently
unboxed the MSI Big Bang M Power
motherboard
and if this doesn't get your geek juices
flowing I don't know what can because as
far as air cooled configs go that is about as Beast looking as it gets here
you got to get you got to get this angle from like back there so you can like see
that and oh here I'll just no I'll rearrange it so you can see like the
yellow ACC I actually really like the yellow accents on the board as well as
on the video card itself that just like that's like Hardware the only way that
this could be more like porn is if I was pulling off all of the heat sinks
because but then you wouldn't even have like the color coordination
anyway so yeah I mean you know even if you get one of their slightly lower end
cards featuring a twin frozer cooler with like a blue Accent on let's see
what that looks like one way or another I think we can all agree that going with
like an all MSI sort of look and feel here is probably a good thing they have
like just so figured out the whole Aesthetics thing in the last little
while here I love it so I think that pretty much covers it the important
things to remember this GTX 680 will overclock better than other GTX 680s
period because you can overvolt the GPU this is very important to remember
especially if you're spending a lot of money on a GPU you want to get the most
performance out of it this is pretty much the way to go so thank you for
checking out my unboxing and first look at the MSI GTX 680 lightning edition
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