MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning 4 GB Review. There is no doubt that AMD's 290X GPU is fast. But no matter how fast a GPU is out of the box, overclocking to squeeze just that little bit more out can yield noticeable performance increases, a fact that MSI know very well. And with this card, MSI have given those with a passion for overclocking something to really get their teeth into.
With the Lightening, MSI has overclocked the core from its standard 1,000MHz to 1,080MHz. While MSI hasn't touched the memory, leaving it at its reference 5,000MHz, it has certainly given those with the itch for speed plenty of cooling to allow room for both the core and the memory to be overclocked.
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| MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning |
The TriFrozr cooler takes center stage in the cooling design. Three fans (each able to be speed controlled separately), with two larger ones on the outside and a slightly smaller but more tightly-bladed yellow fan in the middle, handle the air removal with a seriously massive dual fin-stack heat sink and seven 8mm thick heat pipes behind. It's this cooler that makes up the bulk of this 30cm x 13cm beast, that weighs in at an impressive 1,580 grams.
Given that weight, during testing it was necessary to prop the end of the board up using a couple of folded anti-static bags, in order to balance the card better and take some of the weight off the SATA connectors the board was leaning on. Once the card is securely screwed into a case, this will be less of an issue, however there may still need to be some extra support put around the card.
While adding this extra bracing might be a little more fiddly, it's worth it when you look at the Military Class 4 components being used. This means Super Ferrite high capacity chokes, copper Mosfets and some seriously reliable tantalum capacitors giving a nice heat-tolerant environment to an extremely efficient cooling unit.
Even with this set-up, MSI has gone a step further and - buried in the beautifully constructed case the card comes packaged in - is a metal plate as well as some thermal pads and screws. This plate fits over the DC-DC converters if you decide to remove the heat sink and use a liquid cooled solution while heading for that extreme overclock. Going extreme with liquid cooling is also helped by a switch that allows you to change from normal to a special liquid nitrogen BIOS. Once you move into this BIOS mode, everything is fully unlocked giving total control to all settings. To assist in preventing a total fiery disaster, there are three white connectors on the board that allow you to directly monitor the GPU and memory voltages in real time.
Also in the case are two 6-pin to 8-pin adapters and a couple of Molex plugs which seems somewhat curious. The card requires a 6-pin and two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors, and will pull 275 watt TDP (maximum power draw).
The high-performance cooling, however, means that the Radeon R9 card runs very well at its factory overclock without further overclocking necessary for most applications. Even with the stock settings, the card performed nicely, showing a score of 5,008 on Firestrike Exteme 3D Mark testing. The Crysis 3 GPU test yielded an incredible 96.85 FPS and a very playable 64.47 FPS in the Very High Spec tests. The card started to show its limits at Ultra High 4K (2160p) resolution, dropping to 37.71 FPS -although to be delivering that kind of frame rate at that resolution shows that it still a capable 4K card.
SPECS
Model
Brand: MSI
Model: R9 290X LIGHTNING
Interface
Interface: PCI Express 3.0
Chipset
Chipset Manufacturer: AMD
GPU: Radeon R9 290X
Core Clock: 1080MHz
Stream Processors: 2816 Stream Processors
Memory
Effective Memory Clock: 5000MHz
Memory Size: 4GB
Memory Interface: 512-Bit
Memory Type: GDDR5
3D API
DirectX: DirectX 11.2
OpenGL: OpenGL 4.3
Ports
HDMI: 1 x HDMI
DisplayPort: 1 x DisplayPort
DVI: 2 x DVI-D
General
Eyefinity Support: Yes
CrossFireX Support: Yes
Cooler: With Fan
Dual-Link DVI Supported: Yes
HDCP Ready: Yes
Card Dimensions: 11.89" x 5.16" x 2.17"
Features
Features
Triple Force Architecture
- Triple Level Signals - Show the real-time GPU load by different colors.
- TriFrozr Thermal Design -Triple PWM fans with Independent Control System.
- Pure Digital PWM Control - Digitally controlled GPU, Memory and VDDCI
Twin BIOS & Enhanced Power
- Twin BIOS - Separated BIOS chips for grgular use and LN2 overclocking
- Enhanced Power - 12 GPU phases and 3 Memory phases on a custom designed 12 layers PCB for amazing overclocking potential.
Military Class 4 Components
- Components pass MIL-STD-810G certification for the best stability and quality
- Equipped with CopperMOS, Hi-C CAPs, New SFC and All Dark Solid CAPs.
3X3 OC Kits
- Triple Overvoltage: Total control with GPU, Memory and PLL voltage adjustment
- Triple Temp Monitor: Real time Monitoring of GPU, Memory and PLL conditions.
- V-Check point: For direct and accurate read-out of GPU, memory and PLL voltage
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