MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 Lightning Extreme Video Card Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,321 words · ~6 min read
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so today we have a pretty cool product this is the MSI GeForce GTX 480
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lightning now there haven't been a whole lot of nonreference GTX 480s but this is
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definitely as non-reference as they come it uses a custom cooler so this is a
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twin frozer 3 now please note that all
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of the other GTX 480s that I'm aware of that come with aftermarket air coolers
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are triple slot this one is dual slot
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and even with a dual slot cooler they've achieved better cooling than the stock
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heat sink it also features their power four architecture which is power for
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extreme overclocking including a 16 phase pwm which can provide yeah it's
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okay so it's double the phases of a reference GTX 480 and in order to
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deliver a ton of power to it you've actually got two eight pin connectors
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and one six pin connector for power you've got
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proyer hm features incredible capacitance and czy low ESR
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so to optimize the power supply for extreme overclocking oh okay cool all
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right we've got copper Moss all right so new generation mosfet with built-in heat
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spreader that's pretty cool too we've got the super farite chokes High SE cap
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this is all military class stuff here as well as all solid caps triple over
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voltage which we first saw with the hawk the GTX 460 Hawk Edition and then we
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also have lightning power layer which is a unique PCB design for the GPU memory
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and and power layer eliminates power increases power supply stability and
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eliminates power noise and ripple all right so there lots and lots of layers
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all right let's keep going down here where we have dual 9 cm pwm fans at it's
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90 mm dual formin one heat sinks so dual
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form one heat sinks cover on the front and rear of the PCB to di oh okay I
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think they mean it has a front and a back plate and then you've also got like
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a unisync here so you've got uh cooling for the vrm as well as the memory
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superpipe technology which means big fat
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thick heat pipes high density fins and a nickel plated copper base wow that took
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a long time fortunately the back doesn't really say anything that the front
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didn't already tell us and we can finally get this guy opened up now there
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aren't a whole lot of these made so you can consider this basically
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like limited edition all right comes in a huge box as
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you've proba already noticed and let's have a look at what accessories we get
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with the GTX 480 lightning first we get
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a six pin to 8 Pin adapter okay that's PCI Express power
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another six pin to 8 Pin adapter and then a dual Molex to six pit adapter
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mind you if you don't have a power supply that's already capable of
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powering this card then you need to re-evaluate your build priorities here
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are the plugins for the voltage checkpoints and then we also have a DVI
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to VGA adapter as well as another oh no rather yeah DVI to VGA and DVI to HDMI
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go ahead put that back in there this card is heavy wow all right we got some
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bubble wrap in there down here we looks like we have a CD some sort that you'll
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probably throw away oh here wow it actually comes with an HDMI cable look
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at that okay it comes with the after burer software as well as the NVIDIA
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drivers quick users guide and last but not least lightning series little
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template thing all right let's look at
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the cards so I'm just going to put this back together so that I can put the card
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on here to demo it this thing is
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impressive looking so the first thing we see through the
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packaging is the back plate that covers
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the entire back of the GPU now this is
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okay it's non- reference and even nonstandard this PCB you can see that
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the PCB clearly goes higher than the PCI bracket on the
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back of the card so you've got an additional it looks like about a 3/4 in
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layer here where they've actually H
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housed a lot of the interesting features so they've got some components mounted
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there they've got all the V check points here and then they have all of the power
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plugs also on that little um Riser part
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of the PCB itself all right so let's have a look at the cooler this is a dual
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slot cooler as I mentioned before and youve we've got about about half of the
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back IO plate for rear exhaust so that
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means that probably about W probably not much probably about a quarter of the air
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flow from this fan here is going to go out the back of the case the rest of it
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is going to be released into the case so you can see the ventilation here in the
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back and then there's also room for the air to exit and many other parts of the
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cooler so you can uh kind of reach down there here you can see the superpipe so
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we've got one big long superpipe here and then we have another shorter super
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pipe so those are the thick heat pipes and then we also have several regular
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heat pipes this uses a PCI Express 16x
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interface so that's one of the only standard reference things about this
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card all right you can clearly see the unisync here so if you actually removed
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the twin frozer three cooler from the top of it you could probably Mount GPU
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only blocks and as long as you've got some air flow over the card I'm sure you
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could actually run it that way you've got two SLI fingers which means we've
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got support for two-way as well as three-way Crossfire nice little MSI logo
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here so you can see that the GPU is actually right under there that's why we
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do have some ventilation holes here all right we've got more VMS here we've got
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more ventilation holes here and what are we actually cooling with this thing I'm
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just trying to look under the back plate to see if I can uh I don't think it's
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actually cooling anything I think the point of it is more for Aesthetics than
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anything else so in terms of connectivity options once again we are
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nonstandard we have goldplated connectors and we have a variety of different
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flavors we have two DVI connectors one HDMI and one DisplayPort and what else
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we got here okay we got more heat pipes up at the top I think I already showed
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the top why don't we just get kind of some good angles of the card and you can
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uh you can sort of check it out for yourself here actually here oh should
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probably remove the uh plastic shroud shouldn't I yeah let's do
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that there you go now you can see it better I just completely slipped my
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there we go so now you can see the twin frozer 2 in all of its Glory there's the
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90 mm fans you can see the aluminum fins
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are very dense so what that means to me is that these fans probably have to
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generate a pretty good amount of static pressure in order to get satisfactory
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cooling on this
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card very impressive also large that is all don't
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