MSI Shows New GTX 580, Radeon HD 6970 Cards
Believe it or not, computer vendors are already hosting press conferences for CES even though the show doesn't officially open until Thursday, January 6.
Believe it or not, computer vendors are already hosting press conferences for CES even though the show doesn't officially open until Thursday, January 6. MSI was one of the early birds showing off its new products, and we caught a quick eyes-on of its high-end graphics offerings.
MSI has both offerings from the two graphics camps. First up is the R6970 Lightning, which MSI seems quite proud to brand with its "Military Class II" designation, meaning that it carries "high stability components," which MSI claims are high quality capacitors.
The R6970 has an 18-phase PWM design, along with overvoltage settings from the MSI software. As the name suggests, it has the usual AMD Radeon HD 6970 with 2GB of GDDR5 memory.
The GeForce GTX 580 variant is called the N580GTX and has a 16-phase PWM design and 1.5GB of GDDR5. Its custom cooler is made up of dual 9 cm fans that blow air into the company's SuperPipe design.
In fact, MSI says that its new Frozr III and Cyclone II coolers have a "propeller blade" design that can boost airflow by 20 percent.



@blink180: You know that the airflow through the shrouds increases cooling, right?
@bluekoala: +1
@Tom's: Yea but...that's all the info you've got? No clock speeds or anything?
snooze....
Well, my story may not be typical MSI quality so I won't say all they do is crap but I recently got one of them boards with "military class" components and "better overclocking" features... While it is true that the BIOS had ALL THE SETTINGS YOU COULD DREAM OF... it blew up after 8 hours of use and only 15 minutes or so of running the AMD "stability test"
The funny part was that MSI support told me "This board doesn't support BE1100T" right of the first line of the exchange... WOW... if Marketing is going to say: "This board is tough" don't go for the "Board not tough enough" argument right away!
Funny thing is was not overclocking yet... just running stock speed! so I was well within the powerdraw of Other 6 core parts (on auto overclock) that are supported with the board...
Another thing I want to bring up about supported component lists that is common to all manufacturers or at least most of them: they support no actual RAM that you can buy!
exactly, if you look at the part numbers of certified RAM for a given board, most of them are not on sdale anymore... why? because the test was made during design, 6 months later these parts have been phased out already and replaced by cheaper, better, faster and in stock new DIMMS.
So the whole "supported" part or not, really is a stupid point to make for a motherboard maker because if we were to stick to the list, then we would just not get anything going.
My 2 cents... sorry for ranting.
However, I love MSI products. They never think about if its too much.