MSI N480GTX Lightning Edition Twin Frozr III (NVIDIA GTX 480)

The card and its very huge packaging box.

          Today's technology where rapidly changing so fast and almost every week there's a lot of new hardware release especially in computer industry.Few days ago I purchased this monster card(MSI GTX 480 Lightning Edition) as a replacement on my previous graphic card (ASUS GTX 460 Direct Cu 1Gb DDR5). I can say that MSI built well because every component of this card where all military class type (MSI trade mark for high end components on motherboards and video cards).  This graphic card composed of dual BIOS, DIP switches and has three voltage measurement socket which later I'll show you. Ill try to run several games like Need for Speed Shift 2, NBA 2K11, Lost Planet 2,Starcraft II and Crysis 2 whereas this games run smoothly on maximum settings with 16X AA. 

         One more thing I'll like on this card was its  power management. We know the GTX 480 consumes a lot of power but MSI built a very good power profile whereas the clocks of memory and GPU automatically adjust as low as 50Mhz on GPU and 75Mhz on memory( nice work MSI).

Additional actual photo of MSI N480GTX Lightning Ed:

This card measures approx 11 inches long.

 

Back  of the card. It includes metal back-plate which helps the card to lower down the temperature.

Specs comparison with other video cards:

	Radeon HD 5850	GeForce GTX 470	Radeon HD 5870	GeForce GTX 480	MSI GTX 480 Lightning	Radeon HD 5970
Shader units	1440	448	1600	480	480	2x 1600
ROPs	32	40	32	48	48	2x 32
GPU	Cypress	GF100	Cypress	GF100	GF100	2x Cypress
Transistors	2154M	3200M	2154M	3200M	3200M	2x 2154M
Memory Size	1024 MB	1280 MB	1024 MB	1536 MB	1536 MB	2x 1024 MB
Memory Bus Width	256 bit	320 bit	256 bit	384 bit	384 bit	2x 256 bit
Core Clock	725 MHz	607 MHz	850 MHz	700 MHz	750 MHz	725 MHz
Memory Clock	1000 MHz	837 MHz	1200 MHz	924 MHz	1000 MHz	1000 MHz

The DIP switches for advance overclocking features.

3 power socket (2x 8 pin and 1x 6pin).

 My Test Setup for this card:

Processor : AMD Phenom II X4 B55 unlocked @ 3.6Ghz

Motherboard : MSI 870 G45 AM3

Memory: 4gb Gskill Ripjaws X DDR3 2133Mhz

Video card: MSI N480 GTX Lightning 1536mb DDR5 384bit

Hard Disk : 1Terabyte SATA III Seagate HDD 7200 rpm

Chassis : Coolermaster 690 I Casing

3D Mark 2011 and 3D Mark Vantage benchmark:

     For me the MSI N480GTX Lighting Edition is the fastest Fermi GPU in line with NVIDIA 400 GTX Series available in the market. I've never seen a video card that has independent voltage control which is very useful for extreme overclocking.