MSI R9 290X Lightning Review

Introduction

The R9 290X was a bold move by AMD to regain the ground that they were losing in the escalating power war between them and nVidia. In a lot of ways it was a roaring success, giving excellent performance but was somewhat limited in overclocking capabilities by the combination of poor cooling and power draw. 

MSI have been absolutely dominating the graphics market in recent times with their Gaming range proving to be right on the sweet spot of price and performance. They’ve been some of our favourite cards lately. But what do you do if you want to go hunting world records, or indeed to tweak and tinker to your hearts content for the fun of it?

For that you need the MSI Lightning range. Designed from the outset to pander to the overclocking crowd, the Lightning has no qualms about being strictly for the enthusiast user. So what do you get if you combine the Hawaii GPU with a hardcore overclocking arrangement?

Technical Specifications

We’ll cover the majority of the additions to the MSI Lightning on a further page, but for now sit and bask in the 1080MHz GPU Core speed ‘out of the box’, and take a glance at the power cable requirements. No your eyes do not deceive you, this really can require 3 PCIe power inputs, but not without good reason as you’ll see soon.