MSI GTX 780 Lightning

Our Final Thoughts

MSI has always been a very good GPU partner for Nvidia and I mentioned my excitement for this very card at the time I had written my 760 Hawk review and honestly I feel that a lot of the buzz around this card is well founded as the card simply is overbuilt by a huge margin which lends to its credibility as a major asset to the extreme enthusiasts market.

The new Triple Force triple fan cooling solution is massively capable but I do think that simply keeping all three fans at the same speed might actually be better to allow equal airflow as needed or figuring a way to keep opposing fan speeds from causing airflow problems or tossing from fan to fan which can sometimes cause excess noise.

The VRM is absolutely massive on this card and designed to handle more than I could ever see a 780 GPU ever taking even under the heaviest loading environments.

The change to PSU PCIe Power for the Memory is an interesting innovation and once the reasoning was explained I feel is actually a very cool innovation with a sign to the type of forward thinking I love from design teams as this si what keeps our hobby moving forward for high end enthusiasts like myself.

The Ability to flip a switch and have a LN2 BIOS at that very boot which gives you much higher thresholds and disabled protections to allow for easier subzero clocking is awesome and allows just another intricate layer of functionality and usability to an already amazing card.

I really do feel you need to know what your looking for and of course what a target market is, as the lightning is not necessarily designed for the average gamer but more targeted at the extreme enthusiasts who wants to simply push for record breaking benchmarks more than a better K/D ratio.

Value is a tough one for me as this card is the most expensive 780 on the market by a large margin and it really does cater to the uber-high end user looking to pour LN2 on it and break records, however if you are just using it for gaming I feel there are better cards for your money like even the gaming version from MSI.