 Today I have two things that I'm very excited about. One of them is the fact that it is finally outdoor unboxing season again. That makes me very very happy I'm here in my t-shirt, I'm outside, I'm on the bench, I'm unboxing products. The other one is the product I am unboxing today. This is an awesomely excitingly fantastically uberly sweetness product that I will be checking out today. The first time I saw this was at CES 2011. This is the MSI GTX 580 Lightning. It uses 16 power phases which is four times more than a reference 570 and twice send some to 2.66 times more than a reference 580. It has triple over voltage which means that using MSI Afterburner you can over volt three different aspects of the card. You have the Twin Frozr 3 cooler, it's ready for 3D Mark 11 which basically I guess means it's DirectX 11 which it bloody well better be since it's a 580. It uses the military class 2 concept. We have support for MSI Afterburner, GeForce CUDA, SLI PhysX and 3D Vision. Don't forget also Nvidia surround if you run two of these suckers. Also inside here we find some more information. So powerful architecture, the most powerful power system on GTX 580, tremendous power to the GPU memory and PLL for overclocking to unleash the potential. Okay 16 phase power design. Oh I'm sorry the reference one apparently has eight although my quick Google before starting this indicated six so maybe you guys can leave some comments and tell me which one is correct. Independent memory power looks like this card is going to require dual eight pin connectors. Proatalyzer, Proatalyzer okay features its incredible capacitance and crazy low ESR compared to solid caps. Interesting. Okay. Copper MOS compared to traditional MOSFETs. Super ferrite chokes, highly conductive capacitors. These are the ones with the tantalum core solid caps. Okay so all of that good military class 2 stuff. Lightning power layer. Sweet. Okay so unique PCB design for the GPU memory and power layer increases power supply stability and eliminates power noise meaning ripple. Interesting. Alright so this is one of the few video cards where there's actually enough for them to talk about that they managed to cover this whole thing with completely unique stuff. So dual 9 centimeter PWM fans, nickel plated copper base, high density fins, this is all about the cooler, propeller blades which we've seen debut on the GTX 550 Ti, that was the cyclone. Okay super pipe technology which means thick thick heat pipes and let's see if there's anything else on the back. Finally no. No there is not. So it uses 1.5 gigs of memory like a standard GTX 580 and unless you're talking like big surround resolutions really that's enough. So we got the card, we got, ooo check this out. Okay so the first accessory I'm going to show you guys these are V-checks so you can use these to check the voltage to various parts of your GTX 580 Lightning. So this is a feature we've seen on many MSI motherboards in the past but very few graphics cards. We've got a couple 6 pin to 8 pin PCIe adapters but honestly if you're not using a proper power supply and you're trying to run a beast card like this you're probably doing it wrong. Okay next we have a DVI to VGA adapter also for people who are doing it wrong and finally we have some other stuff down here which is probably mostly irrelevant. Look at that. Massive SLI bridges. Okay MSI afterburner. We've got a quick user's guide as well as whatever this is. Okay so let's go ahead put that back on there and let's get this card out of the packaging so we can see it. Okay pretty heavy. I'll tell you guys that so far although I haven't been able to have a close look at it yet so I can't really say much else about the card itself other than that it is heavy and that it comes in an anti-static bag. Alright beast. Love it. Okay so why don't we start with the inputs and outputs. The first thing you're gonna notice is the gold accents on these DVI ports, HDMI port and yeah check that out display port. So this is a completely custom PCB if you didn't figure that out already featuring non-standard display layout so instead of a mini HDMI we have a full size HDMI and a display port to go along with it. We've got a half of a vent but that's not really gonna matter too much because if you look at the overall design of the cooler it's quite open so it's gonna exhaust a lot of air inside the case as opposed to being completely external exhaust. Mind you if you were planning to install something like this in your system and you don't have a well ventilated case already you're probably doing it wrong. So okay that pretty much covers the back here so why don't we move along to sort of the bottom. So we've got our standard PCIe 16x interface here we've got some super pipes so you can see right there this one and this one are both substantially larger than the standard heat pipes so those are the ones that are carrying the heat furthest away from the GPU which is clearly right about here so over here and way out to the other side so that they transport the heat faster to the areas that are further away from the GPU core itself. You can see the dense dense fin structure I'm gonna spin these fans yeah yeah I know you're not supposed to. Dense fin structure here gives it a ton of surface area to dissipate heat this is a monster cooler but MSI has managed to still maintain a dual slot profile rather than increasing it to triple slot like we've seen on some of the aftermarket coolers on GF 110 based cards. You've got the dual 92 millimeter propeller blade fan so you can see the blades of the fans are slightly different from what we've seen on previous aftermarket MSI coolers and they claim up to 20% more airflow using this blade design versus a similar RPM on a more conventional blade design it's got a really cool looking shroud that we're pretty used to seeing on twin frozer branded cards but I really like it so I'll talk about it more. Alright we've got a unisync you so you can see there is a black unisync that is making contact with the VRM it looks to be making contact with the memory as well you've got yeah you can see a thermal interface pad right there between the memory as well as this unisync so that's going to be getting a lot of direct cooling from the fans here as well as being a passive cooler just by just by making contact with those components and by being a nice big surface area because you can see that unisync is way over here it's here it's here it's way up here just massive now not only that but it's also going to provide more rigidity to the card so you can see this metal piece is actually right along the card here and stretches all the way back to the back what that means is once you install this in your case you know how you see guys with high end systems they got their card installed and it's like it like droops down like this well with this card it's actually very very difficult to flex the PCB because of all of the metal structure there is to it all along the length of the card okay you can see out the back here we've got a four pin PWM setup that is running both of those fans so those fans are just spliced together right about here okay so both of them are running off of the same header we've got you can see kind of the back of the cooler that's kind of irrelevant oh yeah the dual four pin power connectors so the dual four pin power connectors are up here this is where you're getting all your power unlike the GTX 480 lightning there are only two as opposed to three of them so it's a little bit less ludicrous in terms of the power supply that's required to run this guy but that's to be expected as GF 110 is a more efficient chip than GF 100 here we have those V checkpoints so you can use those to monitor the voltage to the GPU the memory as well as the PLL you've also got a bio switch it has two settings now we're used to seeing these on AMD cards from the last generation or so but this is the first time I've seen it on G force based card so you can see there's a liquid nitrogen 2 setting optimized for LN 2 and then there's an original setting we've also got some V switches so this is for memory this is for PWM clock tuner PLL and OCP unlocker so we've got onboard switches these are all covered in tape but you can change the values if you desire okay what else is there to say about this guy yes SLI finger so this should pretty much reveal why it comes with its own SLI bridges the reason is that normal SLI bridges would be blocked by the unisync here as well as all of the structural nonsense that well not nonsense it's good good nonsense that goes on with this card so that's why you need a long SLI bridge so you can plug this in make it up over this stuff and then reach the next over card you know what I think that's pretty much all I wanted to say oh we've got some like LEDs on the back so those probably are for power phase indication or something along those lines crazy Russians indicating something to me oh here's something extreme cool one and extreme cool too we've got some more switches over here so maybe you guys can leave some comments about what that one is because that's not something that I'm familiar with and I did not see it outlined on the packaging so I don't know what that particular switch is for so just want to have a look at the back okay we'll give you one more kind of overall view of the card switch it back around to the front so thank you for checking out this unboxing of the GTX 580 lightning from MSI don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews computer videos and all kinds of other random things whatever I feel like uploading I suppose okay rate crazy Russian told me what he was gesturing about he was gesturing about the fact that the PCB is taller than a standard video card PCB this is the normal height this is how tall a lightning PCB is so this card is physically taller than most cards sorry about that crazy Russian I misunderstood what you were saying because you speak with an accent story of my life