Microstar International is a Taiwan-founded PC hardware producer founded in 1986. Primarily a designer and manufacturer of Computer CPU board, MSI has elaborated its business into barebones computers, servers and workstations, communications machines, client electronics, Notebooks, Netbooks, graphics boards, and other several electronic products. Its company motto, "Quality Products Make Faithful Customer," believes its underlying corporate method of designing and manufacturing quality machine for several markets and letting its high-quality reputation earn it the trust and respect of electronics clients worldwide.


Up for evaluation now is the brand new flagship of the MSI Lightning series, the MSI R7970 Lightning video card. This video card assumes the Radeon HD 7970 to the extreme. The Lightning series is MSI's premier high-end series for GPUs. As such, it carries a premier, but packs in characteristics and hardware customization that no other video card has.


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AMD declared its new Radeon HD 7970, code-named "Tahiti", on December 22nd, 2011. Product availability was created on January 9th, 2012. Tahiti symbolizes a departure from last architectures for AMD. It calls the latest architecture "Graphics Core Next," or GCN. The Radeon HD 6000 series utilized AMD's VLIW 4 and 5 architectures. GCN characteristic a smaller die at 28nm, equated to the 40nm process utilized for the last generation.


Aside from the die shrink, GCN extends a number of characteristic over last generation graphics processing units. One particularly noteworthy characteristic is "ZeroCore Power." This characteristic disables unused graphics processing units throughout long idle times to save power and raise efficiency. This can save energy not only in terms of power consumed by the video card, but it can too lead to diminished heat generation, which can save money in terms of cooling costs.


The Radeon HD 7970 graphics processing unit itself is comprised of 4.32 billion transistors packed into 2048 stream processors with a clock speed of 925MHz. There are 128 texture units, 128 Z/stencil units, and 32 ROPs. That is a 33 percent gain in stream processors and texture units equated to the Radeon HD 6970, but the similar number of ROP. Still so, optimizations and clock speed gains should answer in more effective rasterization.