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 what the card offers. The first thing that struck me on receiving the graphics card was it sheer size and my first impression was that it was merely style over substance, with its obtrusive cooler and marketing spiel dominating the packaging. But in reality, the MSI Lightning offers much more. On closer inspection, I quickly realised that the entire board was etched with high quality components every square centimetre of the way across its PCB, from the NEC Proadlizer, Hi-c capacitors, 18 phase PWM design, super ferrite chokes, Copper heatsinked MOSFETs to the inclusion of extra voltage controllers and dedicated memory power delivery. Teamed with the mighty dual fanned Twin Frozr III cooler, the Lightning is a card to behold not just for its aesthetics but for its real world benefits. Such is their confidence with the board’s design that MSI have applied a 60MHz pre-overclock to the card and are looking at bumping the core by another 30MHz, a testament to their engineering and innovation. The most important thing to note is that the Lightning isn’t a limited edition exclusive card and is actually available to all consumers at a reasonable price, appealing to those simply wanting a reliable but powerful card to extreme enthusiasts looking to push their graphics card to the limit. In my opinion, the Lightning is an excellent accomplishment by MSI and the fact that it allowed the HD6970 to be pushed beyond the 1GHz barrier demonstrates that.


In terms of performance, the R6970 Lightning produced very good results, outperforming the GTX570 prior to overclocking but falling slightly short afterwards. This is mostly due to the overclocking headroom available on Nvidia revised Fermi based GF110 cores. A fair few games were in favour of the AMD card such as Crysis Warhead, Metro 2033, Resident Evil 5, Alien VS Predator, Batman Arkham Asylum, Battlefield Bad Company 2, Mafia II, 3DMark and Unigine’s DX10 benchmark. At stock speed, the MSI card even came close to matching the GTX580 in those games. The problem is that games that favour Nvidia tend to extend the performance gap and overclocking yields relatively better performance scaling. Ignoring games such as H.A.W.X 2, Street Fighter IV and DIRT 2 could easily give the HD6970 the performance crown at £300. This is why at Vortez we test a plethora of games to minimise the chance of our results from being skewed. The HD6970’s 2GB framebuffer comes handy in a number of situations, especially at high resolutions and with high levels of anti-aliasing applied. One such example is Far Cry 2 where despite the GTX570 outperformed the HD6970, the performance gap reduced progressively with higher graphical settings. This makes the HD6970, more specifically the MSI Lightning, ideal for Eyefinity setups and high resolution gaming.

The card isn’t without its flaws. Its 31cm length makes it unsuitable for a vast majority of mid tower chassis. Power consumption was also a major downfall but enthusiasts will no doubt shrug those issues off as they push the Lightning to its limit on a test bench. Cooling was more than adequate and coped well with the 1GHz core, remaining quiet throughout operation. The ability to increase the PowerTune limit by 2.5 times contributes to the increased power consumption but on the other hand, it is a welcoming addition for overclockers. Overall, the slight compromises are small prices to pay for the benefits that the Lightning bring to the HD6970.



For the innovation and engineering that MSI have brought to AMD’s HD6970, I award the R6970 Lightning the Vortez Gold Award.