Rating: 9.0.

1. Introduction 2. MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning 3. Testing Methodology 4. 3DMark 5. Unigine Heaven Benchmark 6. Battlefield 4 (1440P & 4K) 7. Bioshock Infinite (1440P & 4K) 8. Grand Theft Auto 5 (1440p & 4K) 9. Metro: Last Light (1440p & 4K) 10. Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (1440p & 4K) 11. Tomb Raider (1440p & 4K) 12. Temperatures & Thermal Imaging 13. Acoustics Performance 14. Power Consumption 15. Overclocking 16. Closing Thoughts 17. View All Pages

In the high end MSI have earned a reputation over the years for creating some of the finest video cards known to man. Today we take a look at one of their latest flagship offerings – the GTX 980 TI Lightning. This card ships with a beautiful triple fan cooler and is supplied in a heavily overclocked state.



You know this card is serious when you see that it incorporates not two, but three PCIe power connectors. MSI also include an adjusted cooling bracket included that is intended for use alongside LN2 pots in order to draw heat away from the MOSFETs. The Lightning is not a card for the faint of heart – at £659.99 inc vat, the price of admission will be too high for many.



GPU GeForce GTX960

Geforce GTX970 GeForce GTX980

Geforce GTX 980 Ti Geforce GTX Titan X Streaming Multiprocessors 8 13 16 22 24 CUDA Cores 1024 1664 2048 2816 3072 Base Clock 1126 mhz 1050 mhz 1126 mhz 1000 mhz 1000 mhz GPU Boost Clock 1178 mhz 1178 mhz 1216 mhz 1075 mhz 1076 mhz Total Video memory 2GB 4GB 4GB 6GB 12GB Texture Units 64 104 128 176 192 Texture fill-rate 72.1 Gigatexels/Sec 109.2 Gigatexels/Sec 144.1 Gigatexels/Sec 176 Gigatexels/Sec 192 Gigatexels/Sec Memory Clock 7010 mhz 7000 mhz 7000 mhz 7000 mhz 7000 mhz Memory Bandwidth 112.16 GB/sec 224 GB/s 224 GB/sec 336.5 GB/sec 336.5 GB/sec Bus Width 128bit 256bit 256bit 384bit 384bit ROPs 32 56 64 96 96 Manufacturing Process 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm 28nm TDP 120 watts 145 watts 165 watts 250 watts 250 watts

The Nvidia GTX980 Ti ships with 2816 CUDA cores and 22 SM units. The memory subsystem of the GTX980 Ti consists of six 64-bit memory controllers (384-bit) with 6GB of GDDR5 memory.

The MSI GTX980 Ti Lightning 6G has received a clock boost over Nvidia’s reference card, with final speeds set at 1,203 mhz(core)/1,304mhz (boost). The memory is also overclocked, from default speeds of 1,753mhz (7Gbps effective) to 1,774mhz (7.1Gbps effective).

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