The MSI R5870 Lightning is one of the very few Radeon HD 5800 series cards to feature a custom design. It's not just the cooler; MSI has gone all out and built this card right up from a custom PCB to components of top¬notch quality that meet military standards.

The PCB of this card measures 10.1 inches which is just about half an inch less than the length of the reference PCB. But it's wider by three-fourth of an inch to accommodate the extra components used for the 12-phase power design for the GPU and 3-phase power design for memory. MSI has used Hi-C capacitors instead of solid-state capacitors all over which they claim have 8 times the lifespan. lower operating temperature and are more efficient. The reference design features a pair of 6-pin PCle power connectors. but this card uses two 8-pin PCle connectors to feed the additional circuitry and provide extra power to the GPU for better stability while overclocking. The core of the R5870 Lightning comes factory-overclocked to 900 MHz which is 50 MHz faster than the stock speed. But the memory is left running at stock speed (1200 MHz). The cooling system installed on this card is brilliant. An aluminium heat spreader with thermal pad underneath dissipates heat evenly from the memory chips and power circuitry. The GPU is cooled by an enormous cooler that MSI calls Twin Frozr II. It comprises four copper heatpipesand two 75 mm fans.

At 1920x1200 with visual effects set to maximum (enthusiast mode) and 4xAACrysis Warhead ran at a smooth 32 fps and looked gorgeous with highly detailed environment. water and explosions. Race Driver Grid ran without any hiccups with all effects set to maximum and 8xAA at 1920x1080. Just Cause 2 ran at 67 fps at 1920x1080 with effects set to very high and AA disabled.