MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition Review

Conclusion

Actively selling a card with an LN₂ pedigree seems like an odd decision, especially as the majority of pro-overclockers are paid in free hardware for their expertise and feedback. What's more, hardware is usually handed out at the start of competitions, in order to ensure as level a playing field as possible. MSI has clearly developed the N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition with that minority in mind, and then offered the rest of us a go at the delights on offer.


Even when you look beyond the niche-market LN₂ features, though, the Lightning XE still accounts well for itself. As we found, it’s capable of awesome clocks speeds if you wish to dabble in the arts of overclocking and GPU overvolting. Should you instead favour the safe life of factory speeds, it’s still a very quick card, with the additional 1.5GB of GDDR5 memory improving frame rates markedly in some, but not all games.

The Twin Frozr III cooler is also extremely effective - it's quiet when the card is at factory speeds, and it also cooled the GPU extremely well. It had plenty of cooling power to tame our aggressive overclock too. The fact that the card didn’t go into meltdown even when we threw 100W more power into it is testament to the quality of the Twin Frozr III cooler.


The cost for all this finery is high, though. While MSI’s Twin Frozr II-equipped GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB card can be found for £370, the Lightning XE costs £100 more, making it only £100 less than Nvidia's awesome GeForce GTX 590 3GB.

With those prices, the multi-GPU versus single-GPU trade-offs begin to muddy the waters, with the added variability of GPU overclocking thrown into the mix. At its factory settings the Lightning XE isn’t fast enough to justify its price, while at its peak overclocking prowess it’s too noisy and power hungry to live with every day.

The end result is a card that lives up to its liquid nitrogen fuelled, professional overclocking roots; fun to play with and undoubtedly impressive, but not something you would want to use in your main PC.