 This card features a Hawaii XT core with 2816 stream processors clocked at 1.08 GHz boost clock, 4 gigs of DDR5 memory on a 512-bit bus and all that's clocked at 5 GHz as well. But, spoiler alert, that's not actually the interesting thing about this product. The R9 290X Lightning from MSI is the fastest hands-down R9 290X card we have ever tested and really it feels like unlocks the potential of AMD's latest and greatest GPU in a way that we haven't seen yet. With its factory tuning and data center DNA, an Intel 730 Series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts. Now, it's not as simple as just, okay, everyone should just get R9 290X Lightning cards because it's $150 more than a base R9 290X and even $100 more than MSI's pretty strong gaming card that has a dual fan cooler and some of that aftermarket stuff that we like to see. So, what do you actually get for your extra $100? Well, for one thing, MSI has moved beyond the dual fan twin-frozer cooler design to what they're calling the tri-frozer. And while I'm not necessarily convinced that three fans offers a tangible benefit over two larger ones, what's cool about this design is that each of the fans is PWM and can be individually controlled in software. You could actually run whichever ones you want however fast you want, so you could be like, okay, well, I want the 86mm ones on the outside to run faster and the 70mm one, I'm going to ramp that one down because when you have smaller fans and you turn the RPMs up, they can tend to get a little bit whiny and loud. So, you can actually control that however you want to. Now, okay, so before we get into some of the other special stuff, it does support the usual AMD technology, so Crossfire up to 4-way, although you'll need to water-cool it if you want to do that. EK does have a block coming for this card specifically because it is a triple-slot design out of the box. You've got support for AMD Mantle, True Audio, PowerTune, which is their dynamic clock speed ramping up and ramping down to sort of keep the card safe and within the right temperatures and power. You've got easy iFinity with no DisplayPort monitor required, so you could run three monitors off of 2DVI ports and an HDMI port, which is really cool, or even up to six displays if you use a DisplayPort hub. And then, of course, it's got a 4GB frame buffer like all R9 290Xs for a better 4K gaming experience. It also has some unusual stuff, so in the extremely sexy folding box that actually has like a drawer at the bottom for the accessories, along with the usual like, you know, stickers and driver disk and manual and all that stuff, is a certificate of stability, adapters for using a multimeter to check voltages, and a replacement VRM heatsink for sub-zero cooling. Now, the card itself is designed with sub-zero in mind. It uses a completely non-referenced PCB with a 12 plus 3 phase power design for the GPU and the RAM and three PCIe connectors, two 8 pins and one 6 pins, something that that power hungry GPU core in there may actually need when you're really ramping up the clock speed. It's got an LN2 BIOS switch, which is something that manufacturers tell us isn't necessary if you're not going sub-zero, but this is two cards in a row now that we've run into weird throttling issues on. The first one was the Kingpin Classified 780Ti from EVGA that was immediately fixed by enabling LN2 mode. And then once LN2 mode was on, remember you turn it off, flip the switch, because you're loading a new BIOS and then reboot it, the card was a dream to overclock and we didn't run into any issues at all. So also on the top of the card we have an LED indicator to show the card's load. So in theory, the lightning logo is green for no load, blue for medium and red for a heavy load, but in practice, once we overclocked it, it just kind of stayed red because we were pushing it pretty hard. And then it also has a series of blue LEDs on the back that show you how many of the power phases are active at any given time. I did mention that that cooler takes up three slots, but I can see why they did it. Unlike some three-slot coolers I've seen before, almost the entire top of the card is basically a solid grid of aluminum lines and heat pipes running through it and all of that. So in terms of the sheer mass, the card is extremely heavy, so it's not like they just made it thick in order to like kind of put fancy things on it. It's three slot because it actually does perform that well. And I would love to see what a system would look like if you did pull the coolers off and put water blocks on them with four of them running, especially because you don't need the interconnects anymore. So it would look extremely clean, no crossfire bridges. It's all done over the PCI Express bus and would perform incredibly well. Now, before I hand off to Luke for benchmarking and telling you guys what I've been teasing, just exactly how fast this card is, I'd like to give MSI some props here. Even though they are asking for a significant premium for the privilege, they're giving their customers the option to push the card as hard as they want with that LN2 BIOS, even at the risk of bricking it. And while officially they could reject your warranty for stuff that you do to it, in my experience, as long as there's nothing physically altered on the card when they receive it back, they're not going to do that. So if you grab a 290X Lightning, you can pretty much go to town on it because this is a very nicely binned GPU in here with an extremely robust and actually quite quiet under load cooler, an awesome backplate. It looks great. And OK, OK, I'll stop stalling and I'll hand it off to Luke to let you guys know just how ballin this card is. All right, guys, we're going to start off with the bench. We have a CPU, which is a 3960X clocked at 4.0 GHz. For our RAM, we have our RAM running at 1866 MHz. And for the graphics card, it varies. So check out the overclocking dock in the description below and be able to correlate the overclocking settings for those cards, along with the graph that we will show in a moment. It did well. It did pretty much exactly how I expected. And that's not too surprising. It's a really well binned 290X. I've been waiting to get a really well binned 290X so that it could beat my 780 for a while now. And this one did it handily. It doesn't beat the 780Ti, which is again expected, but it's still very nice. If you're looking for overclocking tips, if you get this card, I would highly recommend switching into LN2 mode, even if you're just air cooling. This seemed to add actually quite a bit of stability to the card. I was able to get core clock speeds much higher once I switched into that mode. All right, guys, if you enjoyed this and want to see all the rest of our Linus Tech Tips content, be sure to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips here on YouTube. And while you're here and while your cursor is below this video, clicking subscribe, you're sure to also click like share favorite, all that kind of stuff and comment on whether or not this is a card you're interested in. I know some of the American viewers might be a little bit shaky about getting it just to the cost prohibitiveness there is on buying a 290X in the States right now due to coin mining and all that kind of stuff. If you want to talk about that more, maybe jump over to the forum. It's a little bit friendlier of a comment section. And if you want to get rid of those ads on the forum, you can always contribute any contribution level on the forum gets rid of all the ads. So, yeah, thanks for watching. I'll see you guys next time.