Overclocking

We initially started to overlock the Lightning using the AirForce Panel. We hit the 'game' mode and then cranked all the banks of LEDs to their maximum. The touch panel was so bad that this took the better part of 100 presses of the buttons as they so rarely actually worked.

After a very frustrating time getting all the settings to maximum, we pressed the 'Lightning' button to display the the GPU frequencies to see what our overclocking efforts had gained us and were shocked to find that the core had been upped from 655MHz to 680MHz. We looked through the manual to see if we'd missed something, but apparently we hadn't.

We contacted MSI about the measly overclocking capabilities and were assured that this was due to it needing a 'software update'. So we ditched the panel and went old school using RivaTuner. Not having to press a flakey touch-sensitive button 400 times to make a 5MHz increase was like a breath of fresh liquid nitrogen. Not only that, but we had finally found something that the Lightning was really good at. You can overclock the nuts off of it.

Upping the memory past 1,050MHz (2.1GHz) effective seemed to affect the speed you get on the core, but leaving the memory at that sweet spot the core is happy to go to a whopping 720MHz - a 25 per cent increase in velocity on the core. Given that our thermal testing shows that the cooler is scarcely better than the reference design we can attribute this overclock to MSI's custom power design. The fact that the specially sourced chokes stop the card from squealing like a seven year old watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre makes things all the sweeter.



In its overclocked state, the Lightning was finally kicking some butt in the benchmarks and was even faster than a stock GTX 275. At 1,680 x 1,050 and 4x AA it produced the same minimum frame rate as the GTX 285 and was only a few fps shy in the average frame rate numbers, not a bad just considering the GTX 285 is two models above it.