today I have two things that I'm very excited about one of them is the fact
that it is finally outdoor unboxing season again that makes me very very
happy I'm here in my t-shirt I'm outside I'm on the bench I'm unboxing products
the other one is the product I am unboxing today this is an awesomely
excitingly fantastically uberly
sweetness product that I will be checking out today the first time I saw
this was at CES 2011 this is the MSI GTX
580 lightning it uses 16 power phases
which is four times more than a reference 570 and twice and sum to 2
point whatever 2.66 times more than a
reference 580 it has triple over voltage which means that using MSI After Burner
you can overvolt three different aspects of the card you have the twin frozer 3
cooler okay it's ready for 3D Mark 11 which basically I guess means it's
directed X1 which it bloody well better be since it's a 580 it uses the military
Class 2 concept we have support for MSI After
Burner GeForce Cuda SLI physx and 3D Vision don't forget also NVIDIA surround
if you run two of these suckers all right also inside here we find some more
information so power for architecture the most powerful power system on GTX
580 tremendous power to the GPU memory and PLL for overclocking to unleash the
potential okay 16 phase power design oh I'm sorry the reference one apparently
has eight alone my quick Google before starting this indicated six so maybe you
guys can leave some comments and tell me which one is correct independent memory
power looks like this card is going to require dual 8 Pin connectors proyer
proyer okay features its incredible
capacitance and crazy low ESR compared to solid caps interesting okay copper
Moss compared to traditional mosfets super faite chokes highly conductive
capacitors uh these SE are the ones with the tantalum core solid caps okay so all
of that good uh military Class 2 stuff lightning power layer sweet okay so
unique PCB design for the GPU memory and power layer increases power supply
stability and eliminates power noise meaning Ripple
interesting all right so this is one of the few video cards where there's
actually enough for them to talk about that they managed to cover this whole thing with completely unique stuff so
dual 9 cm pwm fans nickel plated copper
base high density fins this is all about the cooler propeller blades which we've
seen debut on the GTX
550ti uh that was the Cyclone okay
superpipe technology which means thick thick heat pipes and let's see if
there's anything else on the back finally no no there is not so it
uses 1.5 gigs of memory like a standard GTX 580 and unless you're talking like
big surround resolutions really that's
enough so we got the card we got oo
check this out okay so the first accessory I'm going to show you guys
these are V checks so you can use these to check the voltage to uh various parts
of your GTX 580 lightning so this is a
feature we've seen on many MSI motherboards in the past but very few
graphics cards we got a couple six pin to 8 Pin PCIe adapters but honestly if
you're not using a proper power supply and you're trying to run a beast card
like this you're probably doing it wrong
okay next we have a DVI to VGA adapter also for people who are doing it wrong
and finally we have some other stuff
down here which is probably mostly irrelevant look at that massive SLI
Bridges okay MSI After Burner got a
quick user guide as well as um whatever
this is okay so let's go ahead put that
back on there and let's get this card
out of the packaging so we can see it
okay it's pretty heavy I'll tell you guys
that so far although I haven't been able to have a close look at it yet so I
can't really say much else about the card itself other than that it is heavy
and that it comes in an anti-static bag all right Beast love it okay so why
don't we start with the inputs and outputs the first thing you're going to notice is the gold accents on these DVI
ports HDMI port and yeah check that out
DisplayPort so this is a completely
custom PCB if you didn't figure that out already featuring non-standard display
layout so instead of a mini HDMI we have a full-size HDMI and a DisplayPort to
go along with it we've got a half of a vent but that's not really going to
matter too much because if you look at the overall design of the cooler it's
quite open so it's going to exhaust a lot of air inside the case as opposed to
being completely external exhaust mind you if you were planning to install
something like this in your system and you don't have a well ventilated case
already you're probably doing it wrong
so uh okay that pretty much covers the back here so why don't we move along to
sort of the bottom so we've got our standard PCIe 16x uh interface here
we've got some super pipes so you can see right there this one and this one
are both substantially larger than the standard heat pipes so those are the
ones that are carrying the heat furthest away from the GPU which is clearly right
about here so over here and way out to the other side so that they transport
the heat faster to the areas that are further away from the GPU core itself
you can see the dense dense fin structure I'm going to spin these fans
yeah yeah I know you're not supposed to dense fin structure here gives it a ton
of surface area to dissipate Heat this is a monster cooler but MSI has managed
to still maintain a dual slot profile
rather than increasing it to triple slot like we've seen on some of the
aftermarket coolers on gf10 based cards
you've got the Dual 92mm propeller blade fans so you can see the blades of the
fans are slightly different from what we've seen on previous aftermarket MSI
coolers and they claim up to 20% more air flow using this blade design versus
a similar RPM on a more conventional blade design it's got a really cool
looking shroud that we're pretty used to seeing on Twin frozer branded cards but
I I really like it so I'll talk about it some more all right we've got a unisync
so you can see there is a black unisync that is making contact with the vrm it
looks to be making contact with the memory as well you've got yeah you can
see a thermal interface pad right there between the memory as well as this
unisync so that's going to be getting a lot of direct cooling from the fans here
as well as being a passive cooler just by um just by making contact with those
components and by being a nice big surface area because you can see that
unisync is way over here here it's here
it's here it's way up here just massive
now not only that but it's also going to provide more rigidity to the card so you
can see this metal piece is actually right along the card here and stretches
all the way back to the back what that means is once you install this in your case you know how you see guys with
high-end systems they got their card installed and it's like it like droops
down like this well with this card it's
actually very very difficult to flex the PCB because of all of the metal
structure that there is to it all along the length of the card okay you can see
out the back here we've got a four pin pwm setup that is running both of those
fans so those fans are just spliced together right around here okay so both
of them are running off of the same header uh we've got uh you can see kind
of the back of the cooler that's kind of irrelevant oh yeah the Dual four pin
power connectors so the Dual four pin power connectors are up here this is
where you're getting all your power unlike the GTX 480 lightning there are
only two as opposed to three of them so it's a little bit less ludicrous in
terms of the power supply that's required to run this guy but that's to
be expected as gf10 is a more efficient chip than gf100 here we have those V
check points so you can use those to monitor the voltage to the GPU the
memory as well as the PLL you've also
got a bio switch it has two settings now
we're used to seeing these on uh AMD cards from the last generation or so but
this is the first time I've seen it on a GeForce based card so you can see
there's a liquid nitrogen 2 setting optimized for ln2 and then there's an
original setting we've also got some V switches so this is for memory this is
for pwm clock tuner uh PLL and ocp
unlocker so we've got onboard switches these are all covered in tape but you
can change the values if you
desire okay what else is there to say about this ah yes SLI finger so this
should pretty much reveal why it comes with its own SLI Bridges the reason is
that normal SLI Bridges would be blocked by the unisync here as well as all of
the structural nonsense that well not nonsense it's good good nonsense that
goes on with this card so that's why you need a long SLI Bridge so you can plug
this in make it up over this stuff and then reach the next over
card you know what I think that's pretty much all I wanted to say oh we've got
some like LEDs on the back so those probably are for power phase indication
or something along those lines uh crazy Russian's indicating something to me oh
here's something extreme cool one and extreme cool 2 we've got some more
switches over here so maybe you guys can leave some comments about what that one
is because that's not something that I'm familiar with and I did not see it
outlined on the packaging so I don't know what that particular switches for
so just want to have a look at the back okay we'll give you one more kind
of overall view of the card switch it back around to the front so thank you
for checking out this unboxing of the GTX 580 lightning from MSI don't forget
to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews computer videos and
all kinds of other random things whatever I feel like uploading I suppose
okay ra crazy Russian told me what he was gesturing about he was gesturing
about the fact that the PCB is taller than a standard video card PCB this is
the normal height this is how tall a lightning PCB is so this card is
physically taller than most cards sorry
about that crazy Russian I misunderstood what you were saying because you speak
with an accent Story of My Life