 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at pretty much the balleristic GTX 680 out there at this point in time. This is the MSI Lightning Edition featuring unlocked digital power, yes, through your warranty as well. But yes, Lightning Edition cards have triple over voltage, which means that unlike regular Kepler video cards, that is to say everyone's Kepler video cards except MSI Power Edition cards, Lightning Edition cards or any cards that feature their triple over voltage technology. Wait, so the other ones cannot overvolt the GPU, cannot. So your overclocking will always be limited. MSI has unlocked that capability allowing you to break world records and more importantly than breaking world records, just actually get all the performance that you can get out of your video card. So this one's got, oh yeah, GPU reactor as well, which is more for sub-zero overclocking, but I'll show you guys that after. Unlocked BIOS to remove all protections including active phase switching, overcurrent protection and thermal design power restrictions. Bam! Remove it all. Enhanced power design giving you two times the power output, 12 phase PWM design, independent memory power and lightning power layer, whatever that means, but it's probably an additional layer to the PCB or something for cleaner signaling, digital PWM controller for more precise voltage control, et cetera, et cetera. Most of the other cards don't even need this stuff because you can't overvolt them anyway. 3x3 OC kits, so with V checkpoints so you can manually check voltages with a multimeter, triple over voltage and triple temp monitor so you can monitor the GPU, memory and the VRM with Afterburner. Afterburner by the way is my favorite video card overclocking software bar none, it's just the best. Okay, all military class, three components, you got your copper moss, high C caps, gold and solid state chokes and dark solid caps. I mean I think that's a bit of a, you know, okay, okay. You don't need a gold layer on your solid state chokes, but let's baller, so whatever. Dust removal technologies included with the TwinFrozer 4 cooler, it's got super pipes, dual 10 centimeter PWM fans, high density fins, which are good and bad, it depends, dual form in one heatsink. You know what, let's go ahead and get this baby opened up. This is a card that I've been very excited to have a look at here. So in terms of accessories, you got, whoa, a bunch of stuff. Okay, so you got a couple 6 pin to 8 pin PCIe power connectors, you got your V checkpoint cables so you can adapt those out to something that's compatible with your multimeter, you got VGA, DVI to VGA adapter, but get rid of that. Long, flexible, black SLI bridge, the very best kind, as well as a certificate of workingness, quality and stability, quick users guide, drivers that you should throw away, download the latest from the Nvidia website, and the beastly card itself. So let's just put this back together. No, that's okay, I don't need that. Yeah, yeah, don't worry, I'm gonna do that for sure. Okay, slicks just gesturing to me. Mostly obscene gestures, but it's okay. I forgive him. I give him a hard time about things, so he's gotta get back at me every once in a while. All right, lightning card. Oh, I thought this one had three power connectors. In fact, I even said it did in another video, but don't mind me, this has two PCIe 8 pin power connectors, two 10 centimeter fans, and these are actually deeper fans than I'm used to seeing on video cards as well. They have a bit more, well, depth to them. They're also using the propeller blades, which are more efficient blades, and they have these plastic tips at the end that are supposed to reduce noise, increase efficiency, and generally be better. It will spin this way on startup, which will pull some of the air out that's lodged into the heat sink out of it before it turns on, which should in theory keep the heat sink pretty much dust free as long as you power cycle your computer every once in a while, and I've seen this work in action with actually not an MSI card, but with one of their competitors cards that features this counter rotating boot up technology. So it'll be a little loud at the start, but don't be phased by that. It's all good. It'll quiet down as soon as it starts spinning the right way. Huge cooling potential. Check this out. So the radiator fans, the aluminum fans go all the way from here, all the way down to here, all the way to the back of the card. That is an enormous cooler for a single GPU. I mean, that amount of surface area could probably be handling a dual GPU graphics card at this point. Super pipes are also included. See that's these thicker heat pipes here that are carrying the heat much further away from the GPU core itself. Right there, there's a GK104 graphics core. That's the Kepler GPU that's featured in all the high end graphics cards. 670s, 680s, 690s, all that good stuff. You've also got, okay, this is one of the most rigid cards I've encountered. You can see it has almost no flex to it, no matter what I do. And that's for a couple of reasons. Number one, they've got a unisink covering the VRM and the memory components. Check that out. Stick metal all the way here, all the way up here, giving it an amazing amount of structural rigidity all the way here. There's those golden guys right there. Golden girls? Golden years? Wonder years? I don't know where I'm going with this. And it also has a full backplate. So there's a little bit of ventilation hole in this going on here around the PWM, as well as just general backplateness. So this is GP Reactor. You don't have to keep it on. You can take it off if you want. But what it does is it basically builds more components into the very back of the GPU than they would otherwise physically be able to fit, just as a little add-in daughterboard. So like I said, you can take it off if you want. You can leave it on if you want. It's more useful for sub-zero and extreme overclocking. No, I want to put it back on. I think he's giving me a hard time about this. Well yeah, I'm failing at it, but I'll succeed. See? All right, and you can actually orient this however you want as well. So I'm going to do it this way, because once it's installed, I want everything to be right side up, MSI, lightning. There's also blue LEDs behind it that look pretty cool as well. Be noted that the improper installation of GP Reactor card may cause damage to the graphics card. Yeah, that stands to reason. So PCI Express 3.0 data connector, two SLI connectors for up to a four-way SLI functionality. If you had four of these in one system, even I would be jealous at that point, to be perfectly honest. It supports up to three plus one displays, so you got dual DVI, HDMI, and display port out on the back of the card. A little bit of ventilation coming out the back, but this is by and large an internal exhaust card. And that color scheme, oh my goodness. Because we actually recently unboxed the MSI Big Bang M-Power motherboard, and if this doesn't get your geek juices flowing, I don't know what can, because as far as air-cooled configs go, that is about as beast-looking as it gets. Here, you gotta get this angle from back there so you can see that. Here, I'll just, no, that's okay, I'll rearrange it. So you can see the yellow accents. I actually really like the yellow accents on the board as well as on the video card itself. That's like hardware. The only way that this could be more like porn is if I was pulling off all of the heat sinks. But then you wouldn't even have the color coordination anyway. So yeah, I mean, even if you get one of their slightly lower end cards featuring a twin freezer cooler with a blue accent on it, let's see what that looks like. One way or another, I think we can all agree that going with an all MSI sort of look and feel here is probably a good thing. They have just so figured out the whole aesthetics thing in the last little while here. I love it. So I think that pretty much covers it. The important things to remember, this GTX 680 will overclock better than other GTX 680s, period, because you can overvolt the GPU. This is very important to remember, especially if you're spending a lot of money on a GPU. You wanna get the most performance out of it, this is pretty much the way to go. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the MSI GTX 680 Lightning Edition. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.