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MSI Radeon HD 6970 R6970 Lightning Twin Frozr 3 2GB GDDR5 PCIe

Based on 5 reviews

Excellent:

3
Good:

2
Average:

0
Bad:

0

Pros

Overclocked out of the box, Dual BIOS switch, Reasonable price increase, Quiet in idle, Voltage tuning via MSI Afterburner, Low temperatures, DIP switches for enthusiast overclockers, Native fullsize HDMI & DisplayPort output, Up to four active displays.
Extremely cool & quiet, Performs same as (and higher than) GTX 580.

Cons

Fan could be quieter under load, High power draw in idle and Bluray playback, 2nd DVI port is only singlelink, DirectX 11 relevance limited at this time, No support for CUDA / PhysX
Doesn't overclock by a very huge margin

By X-bit Labs on June 10, 2011

The MSI Radeon R6970 Lightning and VTX3D Radeon HD 6970 X-Edition graphics cards are surely highly interesting top-end products. Besides the increased GPU frequency (and memory frequency too, in the case of the VTX3D card), they boast...

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By PCPer on May 20, 2011

I have been a graphics snob/enthusiast since 1996, the year I first picked up a Voodoo Graphics board from Orchid. Where 3D technology was going just blew my mind, and I was hooked from there on out. During the following years there were always...

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By HardOCP on May 09, 2011

The MSI R6970 Lightning is another in a long line of high-quality video cards with a performance that doesn't exactly live up to its high price premium out of the box. However, there is no doubt that the R6970 Lightning is a premium product, and it...

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By Vortez on April 21, 2011

I began the review by mentioning MSI’s tagline, “Innovation with Style” and it became very apparent throughout my experience testing the R6970 Lightning that MSI had a very special product on their hands. Let’s start by looking at...

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By Pureoverclock on April 19, 2011

The 6970 Lightning successfully continues MSI's tradition of bringing graphics cards that feature high performance and low temperatures to consumers that demand high quality products. This card is a behemoth in just about every aspect: it's long...

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By techPowerUp! on April 12, 2011

MSI's Radeon HD 6970 Lightning is a pimped up version of the original AMD HD 6970 reference design. Not much is left as in the original: PCB layout, cooling, clock frequencies, all have been improved upon. As a result the HD 6970 Lightning is one of...

86
By Guru of 3D on April 11, 2011

HAWKs, Lightning's, AfterBurner, Kombustor, Predator ... yeah the aeromotive theme of MSI products certainly stands out. And that makes sense, they try to compare and brand their products towards military class FAST (preferably flying) products. And...

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By Tbreak.com on March 28, 2011

A few days ago I reviewed the MSI N580GTX Lightning card, which proved to be one hell of an overclocking beast at a price point that’s too good to miss. Will MSI’s R6970 Lightning which has received the same brilliant engineering treatment...

80
By Kitguru.net on March 25, 2011

High clock speeds, low noise, great temperatures, excellent...

95
By HardwareZone.com on March 25, 2011

Out of the box, the performance of the new R6970 Lightning was pretty disappointing. It started brightly on the two synthetic benchmarks, 3DMark11 and 3DMark Vantage, posting gains of around 5%, but real world applications such as Crysis and...

80