MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition Review

Overview

 

While looking at the impressive Hazro HZ27WC it became apparent that running games at a resolution of 2560×1440 required significantly more horsepower than at 1920×1080. Asking the GPU to now shift in excess of 3.6 million pixels began to put considerable strain on the 2 GTX580s found in my rig. With this in mind the hunt was on for more horsepower…

Enter the MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition; an overclocked 3GB version of the NVIDIA GTX 580.

 

 

The card came well packaged in a smart box detailing many of the features of the card. In the box, other than the card itself, you will find a quick user’s guide, a N580GTX Lightning guide, CDROM (drivers, utilities, etc.), 3 to 4 pin power adapters (2 off), DVI to D-sub (analogue) adapter, SLI connector (2 off) and 3 voltage monitoring fly-leads (these have specific sockets on the card for additional voltage monitoring).

 

 

These cards are specifically designed to handle extreme overclocking with the GPU Core Clock coming factory overclocked at 832MHz (standard GTX 580 772MHz) with the memory running at 4200MHz (standard GTX 580 4008MHz) the card is also equipped with 3GB GDDR5 RAM. The card sports MSI’s latest cooler the Twin Frozr III, with dual 9cm Propeller Blade PWM fans that MSI claim increase airflow by 100% over standard fans. These fans actually start-up in reverse and run for 30 seconds to aid in the removal of dust! Running temperatures of the Lightning Xtreme are said to be 21°C lower than that of a reference design and the card also runs 5db quieter.

The fans also support MSI Smart Temp Sensor Tech (Overheating Notice), the colour of the fans begin to change from blue to white as the system temperature begins to exceed 45 °C, indicating that the system temperature may be too high.

 

 

The cards are shipped with the MSI’s own Afterburner overclocking utility that allows not only voltage adjustments of the GPU Core, but also of the Memory and PLL(VDDCI), this allows the card to be pushed some 30% more than the reference design. On the rear of the card you will find a DisplayPort, HDMI and 2 DVI ports.

 

 

Specifications/Features

courtesy of MSI

 

* Additional details available here

 

First Impressions

 

Considering the price of £500 you don’t seem to get much other than the card, so you won’t be buying this card because of its bundle. This is a little disappointing, but this purchase is really all about the card, and the card really is rather impressive!

 

 

Wow it’s heavy! ohh and big, no make that huge! This card is 305mm in length (Length: 305 / Depth: 127mm / Width: 45mm) and weighs 1170grams , that’s 320grams more than the Plait GTX 580 found in my rig! You certainly feel that you have got something for your money here, reading all the specifications and features seems to just confirm this.

 

 

The MSI Lightning Xtreme is well made and looks good and somewhat purposeful, but is not adorned with go faster stripes etc, personally speaking, this is something that I like!

 

Hardware Installation

 

Hardware installation was predictably easy, although it is worth noting that the card utilises x2 8 pin connectors instead of the usual x1 6 pin & x1 8 pin connectors found on the reference GTX 580. I also had no issues with installing the MSI Lightning Xtreme into my case, as the Antec Twelve Hundred V3 used in my rig swallowed the card with ease, even at a length of 305mm.

 

 

The machine booted fine with the new card in place with the fans running in reverse for the first 30 seconds to clear any dust build-up. This is indicated by the fans having no LED lighting present while running in reverse. After 30 secs the fans changed direction and the blue LED lights were illuminated (Nice!).

 

Testing Methodology/Setup

 

As drivers and software (MSI Afterburner) will be used for this review my rig was rebuilt using Windows 7 Home Premium (Service Pack 1) with all associated drivers installed. The latest version of the NVIDIA drivers were used (version 285.62).

The 2.1 version of the MSI Afterburner supplied with the card did not seem to support memory & PLL Voltage Tweaking (even though it is mentioned on the box!?) so I downloaded version 2.2.0 Beta 8 which worked fine…

 

Hardware Performance

 

STOCK PERFORMANCE (Core Clock: 832Hz / Memory Clock: 4200MHz (Effective))

 

• 3DMark 11

Resolution	Score	Ambient Temperature	Max GPU Temp	Delta Temperature
1920×1080 (Extreme)	X2234	21.5	65.0	43.5
1280×720 (Performance)	P6767	21.5	65.0	43.5

 

• Unigine Heaven

Resolution	Score	Ambient Temperature	Max GPU Temp	Delta Temperature
2560×1440	497	22.0	67.0	45.0
1920×1080	750	22.0	67.0	45.0
1680×1050	842	22.0	67.0	45.0

 

• Metro 2033

Resolution	FPS	Ambient Temperature	Max GPU Temp	Delta Temperature
2560×1440	17.67	21.5	67.0	45.5
1920×1080	29.0	21.5	67.0	45.5
1680×1050	33.33	21.5	67.0	45.5

 

After a good showing at the factory stock over-clock it was time to see what performance this card was really capable of. Using MSI Afterburner I slowly began to increase the Core clock, my first stop was at 860MHz and the card breezed through the benchmarks. I then upped the core further to 875MHz at this point I noticed small artefacts appearing in the Unigine Heaven benchmark. It was time to add some voltage…

Repeating the steps above over many iterations and witnessing numerous errors (although the card only ever seemed to crash the running application, never Windows), I had the card stable with the GPU Core at 940MHz! This overclock required just 118mV of additional voltage to be stable, but with more testing and more time this card will definitely run faster, but the additional speed comes at much higher price once you pass approx 950MHz. The amount of voltage increase required to gain very little Core Clock makes it very much a case of ‘diminishing returns’.

It was now time to move on to the memory overclock. This, at first seemed easy as the memory overclocked with no additional voltage to 2300MHz+ (4600MHz effective), but after testing for longer periods (30mins+) I found that Unigine Heaven would fail. After further testing and adding 40mV of additional voltage to the memory I settled on 2200MHz (4400MHz effective).

With these overclocks (Core @ 940MHz Mem @ 4400MHz) now STABLE it was time to re-run the benchmarks…

 

 

OVERCLOCKED PERFORMANCE (Core Clock: 940Hz / Memory Clock: 4400MHz (Effective))

 

• 3DMark 11

Resolution	Score	Ambient Temperature	Max GPU Temp	Delta Temperature
1920×1080 (Extreme)	X2493	22.0	73.0	51.0
1280×720 (Performance)	P7443	22.5	74.0	51.5

 

• Unigine Heaven

Resolution	Score	Ambient Temperature	Max GPU Temp	Delta Temperature
2560×1440	542	21.5	72.0	50.5
1920×1080	818	21.5	72.0	50.5
1680×1050	921	22.0	73.0	51.0

 

• Metro 2033

Resolution	FPS	Ambient Temperature	Max GPU Temp	Delta Temperature
2560×1440	19.33	23.0	74.0	51.0
1920×1080	31.33	22.5	73.0	50.5
1680×1050	36.0	22.5	74.0	51.5

 

As you can see the MSI Lightning Xtreme shows great performance at its factory overclock settings, but it’s the overclocked results that show you the true power of the card. The 3DMark 11 benchmark show the most significant gain of almost 12%. The average performance increase due to the additional overclock is approximately 10%.

During the overclocked testing fan noise was not an issue at any point. The fans span up to a maximum of 70% and could not be heard over my system housed in an Antec Twelve Hundred V3 case. Obviously if you are happy with higher fan speeds (more noise) then you can set this via MSI Afterburner. But I found the stock cooling profile to be more than adequate and relatively quite.

 

• MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme 3GB (Core: 940MHz / Mem: 4200MHz) vs Palit GTX 580 1.5GB (Core: 783Hz / Mem: 4008MHz)

Card	Benchmark	Resolution	Score/FPS
MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme	3DMark 11	1920×1080 (Extreme)	2493
Palit GTX 580	3DMark 11	1920×1080 (Extreme)	2110
MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme	3DMark 11	1280×720 (Performance)	7443
Palit GTX 580	3DMark 11	1280×720 (Performance)	6381

MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme	Unigine Heaven	2560×1440	542
Palit GTX 580	Unigine Heaven	2560×1440	493
MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme	Unigine Heaven	1920×1080	818
Palit GTX 580	Unigine Heaven	1920×1080	754
MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme	Unigine Heaven	1680×1050	921
Palit GTX 580	Unigine Heaven	1680×1050	N/A

MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme	Metro 2033	2560×1440	19.33
Palit GTX 580	Metro 2033	2560×1440	15.67
MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme	Metro 2033	1920×1080	31.33
Palit GTX 580	Metro 2033	1920×1080	27.33
MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme	Metro 2033	1680×1050	36.0
Palit GTX 580	Metro 2033	1680×1050	N/A

 

Evaluated against a near stock GTX 580 (Core:783/Mem:4008) the MSI Lightning Xtreme shows performance increases of up to 23% in the Metro 2033 (2560×1440) benchmark (note: this is one of the best REAL WORLD benchmarks for DX11). 3DMark 11 shows a 18%+ increase, and Unigine Heaven shows a 10% increase, with the best gains showing up in the high-resolution (2560×1440) tests. It is at these higher resolutions that the 3GB of VRAM that the Lightning Xtreme has comes into play.

We will be looking into 1.5GB VRAM vs 3GB VRAM and SLI in a later article (look here)…

 

Final Thoughts

 

The MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition has put in an impressive showing here at pcGameware outperforming a near stock GTX 580 by 23% in the Metro 2033 (2560×1440) benchmark. As this test is one of the best Real World DX11 tests available today, that represents modern gaming, this is a rather impressive achievement! This is brought about by the high overclocks (both Core & Memory) and by the additional 3GB of VRAM.

The card is extremely overclockable, I stopped at 940MHz due to the fact that it is at this point that heat (due to the high voltages now being used) starts to become an issue. I would say that for me 940MHz was the sweet-spot, as beyond this point far more voltage was needed per clock increase, resulting in much high temperatures and more noise. Those able to keep the cards cooler, or those who are less concerned about the noise levels may well push close to that magical 1GHz point, but I’ll leave that to you!

The question that crops up at this point is; how fast does this card need to be to be worth its £500 price tag? This is a difficult question to answer and one that to some degree I will side step, but…

There is no doubting the card’s performance, but a quick price check shows that a standard GTX 580 can be had for approx £365! Now knowing that the card is capable of delivering almost a 25% performance increase, if we add 25% to the price of a standard GTX 580, this puts the price at £456. Add in the fact that the card IS capable of higher overclocks (if you dare!), features a dust removal technology, a fan temperature overheating technology, and comes with a 3 year warranty. So is the Lightning Xtreme still a little expensive? I’ll leave you to make up your own mind…

 

Verdict