MSI’s R5870 Lightning is a very nice card with Military Class, custom black PCB, Twin Frozr II VGA cooler, a serious power supply and gold plated connectors!
MSI has followed US Department of Defense MIL-PRF-39003L guidelines for the card components that explains why the Military Class branding.
The R5870 Lightning comes with a 15-phase PWM (PWM = pulse width modulation) power supply: 12 phases for the GPU and 3 phases for the memory. The Radeon HD 5870 reference board has only 4-phase for the GPU. The following images show the difference between both PCBs:
MSI R5870 Lightning PCB
Radeon HD 5870 reference board PCB
The R5870 has a series of twelve LEDs on the rear of the card showing active vGPU power phases:
I like this kind of gadget 😉
The R5870 Lightning requires two 8-pin PCI-Express connectors:
Like the R5770 Hawk, only the GPU is factory overclocked:
– GPU: 900MHz (ref: 850MHz)
– Memory: 1200MHz
The TDP is 193W (ref= 187W) and the power consumption in idle mode is 27W.
And like the R5770 Hawk, the R5870 Lightning comes with V-Check points. But this time, there are 3 voltage check points: for the GPU core, for the memory and for the VDDCI (additional core voltage on Radeon HD 5870 boards: the voltage of the non-shader area of the GPU core):
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