MSI N580GTX Lightning Twin Frozr III

MSI GTX 580 Lightning Twin Frozr III review

Nvidia's GTX 580 is a highly desirable card. AMD doesn't have a card to rival it. The HD 6970 is decent but doesn't compete directly. And the dual Antilles-powered HD 6990 overshoots the price mark at £540. What's more, the GTX 580 is more power efficient. It's the optimum Fermi card, and a solid foundation for third parties to muck around with. MSI is good at keeping graphics cards cool, as it has demonstrated with its Twin Frozr cards. It's also rather good at overclocking: the Afterburner software is an office favourite. And the GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II pushed a conservatively clocked card to impressive clock speeds and resultant performance levels. The clock speeds of Nvidia's reference GTX 580 are bold, but not on the ragged edge, so the whole N580GTX Lightning package is about squeezing every bit of potential possible from an already formidable Fermi card. One aspect of that comes with the increased core, shader and memory clock values. The core's bumped around 10 per cent from 772MHz to 832MHz, and the other clocks follow suit in a similar percentage increase. It grabs an extra two to three frames in all DX11 benchmarks, from Heaven 2.5 to Metro 2033.