Ride the Lightning - MSI R5870 Lightning
By
Temperature, Power Consumption & Overclocking
Temperature
We knew the Twin Frozr II cooler would be effective, but we never expected the MSI R5870 Lightning to record only a mere 62 degrees Celsius at load. This is certainly impressive considering a stock Radeon HD 5870 runs at a much higher 78 degrees Celsius. The MSI card also managed to pip the Sapphire HD 5870 Vapor-X.
Power Consumption
Power consumption figures were significantly higher than that of a stock Radeon HD 5870. But then again, we were powering the card with two 8-pin connectors, so that might explain the slightly higher readings.
Overclocking
The MSI R5870 Lightning is positioned as the card for extreme overclockers, and while we didn't bring out our LN2 canisters, we managed to get a respectable 1000MHz at the core and 5000MHz DDR using nothing more than just MSI's Afterburner overclocking utility and pumping up the voltage values a tad to 1.25V (default was 1.162V). The resultant score on the Extreme preset of 3DMark Vantage was 9765 – an improvement of 8%.
