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MSI GeForce GTX 780 LIGHTNING Video Card Review

We've got MSI's flagship GeForce GTX 780 LIGHTNING video card to evaluate today. This video card has a new design, comes completely customized from the ground up, and has obtained the highest overclocked we've ever achieved on a GTX 780. We put it up against the GALAXY GTX 780 HOF and the AMD Radeon HD 7990.

Power Testing

We tested the power utilization at the wall of the entire system without a video card, and with each video card at idle and full load. For full load power and temperature testing we used real gaming, in this case every game we tested. The power supply used in testing is a Enermax MaxRevo 1350W. Our system is very lean with only one optical drive and one hard drive being powered. Total system wattage at idle without video card is 67W.

Running at idle, the MSI GeForce GTX 780 LIGHTNING and the GALAXY GeForce GTX 780 HOF idled near the same wattage. However, at full-load things changed quite a bit. The MSI GTX 780 LIGHTNING pulled 407W system power and the GALAXY GTX 780 HOF drew 15W more at 422W. The Radeon HD 7990 pulled the most wattage at a big 538W draw.

When overclocked the GALAXY GTX 780 HOF pulled more wattage, up to 501W versus the MSI GTX 780 LIGHTNING's 458W. Remember, the GALAXY GTX 780 HOF was running a higher GPU voltage, even though it was running slower clock speeds. Raising the voltage on GPUs creates a much higher power draw.

In terms of power efficiency, the MSI GTX 780 LIGHTNING is better on all fronts, idle, full-load and overclocked.

In terms of temperature, the tables take a turn. Firstly, at idle both video cards chime in at about the same idle GPU temperature. However, at full-load the GALAXY GTX 780 HOF runs much cooler at 62c max compared to the MSI GTX 780 LIGHTNING's 77c max temperature.

This could be all down to the fan speed. We noticed the fan speed was running at a high 60%+ on the GALAXY GTX 780 HOF, while the three fans on the MSI GTX 780 LIGHTNING run much slower, in the 30% range, so half the speed basically. This makes the MSI GTX 780 LIGHTNING much more quiet at full-load. But it does mean the GPU temp gets warmer.

However, even at 77c we still are not reaching the thermal limit of 80c imposed by GPU Boost 2.0. Therefore, the temperature stays under the throttle limit meaning the GPU can clock itself upward without restriction. In our experience it got up to 1124MHz while gaming, which was higher than the GALAXY GTX 780 HOF.

So while its warmer, it is running a higher frequency, and it is still below the thermal throttle of 80c. Also, it is quiet because of the slow rotation speed. If you want it to run cooler, it surely can do so by increasing the fan speeds.

When we overclocked the MSI GTX 780 LIGHTNING we set the three fans to 100% and as you can see the temperature was a solid 63c. This temperature was cooler than the GALAXY GTX 780 HOF's temp of 75c with its fan at 100%. So at 100% fan speed the MSI GTX 780 LIGHTNING has a large temperature advantage.

The AMD Radeon HD 7990 was warm at idle or full-load. Being a dual-GPU card, the entire card itself was warmer as well.