Have you ever had a card just ‘fit’ your needs so well that it was hard to look past all it did so amazingly well to look for nits to pick? Most non-reviewers will probably honestly answer that question with a “No…why would anyone do that. That is like looking a gift horse in the mouth to check its teeth!”. Reviewers on the other hand will instantly go ‘YES!….and damn those white buffalos are hard to be fair and balanced over”. Out of over literally hundreds of reviews we have done, we can personally count on one hand the number of times this has happened…. and every time it has happened it has been on parts that just resonated with us and stayed in one system or another for a long, long time. The first was an Intel X-80 Solid State Drive that is still going strong to this day in an older system. Another was a CoolIT Freezone Elite that is still being used by a fellow reviewer of ours in their testbed. The (previously) most recent was the Intel 750 1.2TB NVMe solid state drive – that will have to be pried from our cold dead hands. The all new MSI GTX 980Ti Lightning is another white buffalo that happens so rarely that they are always memorable, and always models we continuously refer back to. They are simply the gold standard upon which others in their class must be judged.
After working with numerous Twin Frozr V cards we must admit to liking this custom design a lot. It works, it is silent, and it offers copious cooling potential. The TriFrozr is better. It too is just as low noise a solution; it too works amazingly well…but offers so much more cooling potential that you really will be looking long and hard to find its equal. There is so much cooling potential that even when heavily overclocked things like worrying about short term boost performance vs long term boost become almost moot. You set a speed and if you let the fans go full throttle this card will hit that speed and stay there. All by itself this Tri-FROZR design and what it brings to the table alone makes the 980Ti Lightning one of the best 980Ti cards on the market today. Price be damned.
However this is only the tip of the Lightning iceberg, and just like an iceberg most of its raw power is hidden beneath the surface. If you do crack open the heatsink and look at the PCB not only will you find an extremely robust secondary heatsink to keep the RAM and other critical components cool, you will also find one of the best power delivery subsystems you will find on any NVIDIA card available today – including Titan X models. This power delivery system provides ultra clean, ultra-stable power to the Maxwell core and the RAM and does so even when everything is maxed out. Honestly phrases such as ‘built like a tank’, ‘overbuilt so much that even infantry couldn’t break it’, and even ‘overkill’ spring to mind. This too makes the MSI 980Ti Lightning a cut above the rest.
Now with all that said this card costs more than the typical GTX 980Ti and will simply not be within reach of most consumers budgets. Honestly, besides debates over 2 slot vs 3 slot designs, that is about the only thing consumers can legitimately complain about with this card. If you want the best, you have to be willing to pay for the best and at $799 this card is still one of the very few cards that can easily be classified as ‘the best’. If you are the type of person who can afford, can justify, and wants what is easily one of the elite breeds of ‘best’ this card had better be on your short list. For anyone not interested in selling their first born, a kidney or other vital appendage the Lightning may not be right for you – and that is why MSI offers the more reasonable Gaming 6GB 980Ti…which is no slouch either.
Beyond the price the only really ‘controversial’ part about this card is that it MSI follows NVIDIA’s strict guidelines on voltage limitations. Yes this card will not push more voltage than the Gaming 6G GTX 980Ti; however that is not the same as saying the core is not more highly binned and goes further with what it can do. This is part of the reason why these cost more than a typical 980Ti – as binning cores and only using the cream of the crop is time consuming and bloody expensive! If getting the core to a ‘mere’ 1,500Mhz really is not enough for you…you can always find guides on hard voltage modding. For the rest of us sane people, such an overclock is more than enough.
