MSI GTX 780 Lightning 3GB Graphics Card Review

Overclocking

MSI’s GTX 780 Lightning is built from the ground up to be a graphics card for overclockers. All the extra features it has are primarily designed for overclocking – the dual BIOS, the advanced power circuitry, V-Check points and so on. It is therefore unsurprising it was the best GTX 780 we had in terms of final stable core clock speed. Final stable clocks were an impressive 1123MHz on the GPU core and a rather mediocre 1670MHz on the memory. The low memory clock is due to the mediocre quality of the Elpida memory chips MSI chose to use, SK Hynix or Samsung equivalents would have done at least 75-150MHz better. Here’s how the MSI GTX 780 Lightning stacks up against other GTX 780s we tested:

• MSI GTX 780 Lightning – 1123MHz Core, 1176MHz Boost and 1670MHz Memory
• Gigabyte GTX 780 GHz Edition – 1060MHz Core, 1112MHz Boost and 1852MHz Memory
• Gigabyte GTX 780 WindForce OC – 1054MHz Core, 1106MHz Boost and 1762MHz Memory
• Nvidia GTX 780 – 1045MHz Core, 1084MHz Boost and 1735MHz Memory

Despite having the highest clock speed of all GTX 780s for some reason the MSI Lightning wasn’t the fastest. My guess is that the memory clock held it back or this particular chip just didn’t like high clock speeds that much. We did re-run the test several times but with the same results. The results were even more surprising given that the actual benchmark frequency was as high as 1300MHz.