Quite honestly this video card is the most pleasant and yet frustrating video card to overclock. On the one hand that amazingly beefy power delivery system combined with three PCIe power connectors allows for amazingly stable voltages. Simply put you set it and you forget it as it is not going to bounce around like a tennis ball. When you then take those over-engineered components and give it a cooling system that rivals the best water based cooling solution in both the noise and temperature department this too makes things so much easier it is not even funny.
Then, and this really is the icing on the cake, when you take into account that MSI has worked closely with NVIDIA to provide Lightning owners with the absolute crème de la crème of 980Ti Maxwell cores…well it really is smile worthy. However, this is where the frustration comes into play. Because NVIDIA basically threatened MSI with never getting another GPU from them during the earlier Lightning days, this card – just like the 780Ti has been handicapped in the voltage department. Basically you will not be able to push any higher voltage on this card than you would on a reference model. That is so damn frustrating and would be like owning a Mclaren F1 but never being allowed to take it out 3rd…as the higher gear slots on the shifter have been welded shut. This is why we only reached a boost rate of 1,505Mhz. Getting this was extremely easy, crank the voltage all the way and start playing…which did not take all that long to dial in. Of course, this is still a 40% overclock over reference levels, but we know this highly binned core could have done even better.
Now do not get us wrong this is not MSI’s fault, they did try to get this artificial limitation removed for the Lightning series…and NVIDIA refused to negotiate in good faith. When being faced with what is tantamount to blackmail we cannot fault MSI for taking this hit and protecting their long term interest. Instead the blame almost solely rests on the shoulders of NVIDIA and their shortsightedness…and the rest being AMDs fault for not being able to compete in the ultra-high-end (the Fury series is good…but no Lightning). We all know that if NIVIDIA had true competition in this area they probably would be a lot less shortsighted about working with manufactures like MSI on their ‘special’ models.
On the positive side, if you are handy with a firmware hack…or even just a soldering iron you can get around this limitation and really crank things wide open. We personally did not feel the need for this as MSI will null and void your warranty if you do either.
Also on the positive side MSI gives you RAM voltage options that usually are only in the realm of hardware mods! This allows for downright insane overclocking on the RAM side of the equation…and really will come down to be how far you are willing to push things. For us we are a bit on the conservative side and while the RAM certainly was capable of even higher (we had it in the 8700 range before quickly scaling back to long term survivable levels)…we felt getting an effective speed of 8,344Mhz was ‘good enough’. After all this is a full 1,344MHz above reference speeds (an 19% overclock!) and this pushes the memory bandwidth from 336.5GB/s all the way to 400.5GB/s!
