MSI N480GTX Lightning looks to be one of the most extreme graphics card of the year and the launch earlier this week happened at the overclocking event MSI MOA 2010. Swedish overclockers Jon and Henry showed the potential of the card by pushing it over 1400 MHz GPU clock.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 is a power consuming card from factory and ships with 700MHz GPU clock frequency. MSI rasies the bar to 750 MHz with N480GTX Lightning, but there is potential for alot more with the right cooling. During world world final of MSI Master Overclocking Arena Jon “elmor” Sandström and Henry “ME4ME” de Kruijf reach a GPU clock frequency north of 1400 MHz with MSI N480GTX Lightning, stable through 3DMark Vantage.
MSI has really outdone itself with the latest Lightning model, the card has 16-phase power supply (12+3+1) and can handle currents up to 480 ampere(!), quite a lot more than the already stable 154 ampere of the reference card.
The card comes with three power connectors, two 8-pins and one 6-pin, the latter dedicated to the memory modules. MSI has designed N480GTX Lightning with measuring sports for voltages and you can alter the voltages for GPU, Memory and PLL directly in Afterburner.
Other noteworthy components are copper MOSFETs for better capacity and lower temperatures, proadlizer capacitors, dual BIOS chips and levers for improving the circuits’ handling of extreme temperatures (LN2 cooling and such).
MSI has really outdone it self with the development of N480GTX Lightning and we’re very interested in seeing what kind of clock frequencies and benchmark results the card will bring in the near future. The price is expected to land around $550.
Source: Hwbot, Techsweden
