680 GTX: MSI Lightning vs. ASUS DirectCU II TOP

I'm surprised when you say it's large.
my triple fan 680 is quite a bit smaller than my previous directCU 2 580.
But yeah, huge fan of the 600 /7000 series lightnings, i'd need an windowed case for it, to see the flux capacitor.

 

Congrats on the buy, as far as I know there is only three of us on the forum with this card!

And yes, dont be shy to put everything on max settings while playing because the card is a BEAST!!

 

That's great to hear Michael. Keep enjoying your beast!

Mind you sharing what clocks this bad boy its hitting..? More interested in stock oced clocks not unlocked ones..

 

MSI oc'd the Core Clock to around 1110 MHz (1176 MHz with boost)
and the Memory Clock is around 6.008 GHz.

There's a lot of further oc potential from what i heard,
but for now i'll leave it "stock" (MSI stock, that is).

Again, thanks for the advice guys and girls!

 

Highest i can get mine so far is 1372 boost clock. Memory could go a bit higher maybe. currently at 7108.

This is on the ln2 bios though with high voltage.

 

what voltage does your card get at that speed? 1.21v or more?

 

1.36 according to my multimeter...

 

Was hoping for 1400+ but i guess that isn't going to happen without giving it even more voltage.

 

I swore off ASUS after motherboard problems and my 580s running too hot and crashing in DX11 games.

I ordered MSI Lightening 680s but after 6 weeks I hadn't received them (even though the retailer claimed they were in stock on their website) so I cancelled that order and tracked down some Palit Jetstream 680s (which at the time were hard to find in Australia). Couldn't be happier with them.

 

Another fellow user with JS's! milamber, what clock does those hit? In sli and if possible in single too. I would appreciate some thoughts on them since I'm considering sli too. Thank you.

 

Sometimes I wish I kept mine. A beautiful, high quality card. I read the voltages were locked without flashing the bios, so I took it back...Congrates on your purchase. I'm not disappointed with my EVGA 680, but the lightning just looked fricken cool...

 

Why didn't you just do the bios flash?

 

Probably didn't want a $600 brick taking up room in his case, anything goes wrong then it's no more game time.
I would never use the word 'just'when talking about flashing gpu bios, like 'hey fellas! just do this! BOOM!' card is worthless in the space of what? 5 secs.

i owned my card a number of months before flashing so i knew it was solid and didn't need rma, i was also having a bad day at the time and this moved me to do it also. hehe

 

Not much risk i think. If flashing an unlocked ln2 bios goes wrong you can always go back to the normal bios with the switch. Not ideal maybe but the card survives.

I'm not 100% sure it works this way but that's what i told myself when i flashed mine.

 

I'd agree that with the lightning it's a somewhat different situation, there's a huge number of 680 lightning owners that have flashed theirs and there's massive amounts of help over the web for these cards too. I think they're awesome cards, there was supposed to be an extreme edition gonna be released but who knows, just like the 7970 ghz edition by Gigabyte that never was.
and the fact the lightning has a switch too makes it different of course, like the gigabyte soc.

 

I doubt they will release an extreme edition unless nvidia allows voltage control.

It's already ridiculous that you have to do a bios flash to get voltage control on a card like this. For the average user it is still a stressful moment even if there is a lowered risk on this card.

If you don't plan to go for high clocks you might as well save some money and get a cheaper version.

 

FYI. I bought mine not knowing about the voltage limitation. I was more pissed then worried about flashing. I had already flashed a dual bios 6950( held my breath for a good 2 min lol). The problem to me was losing the warranty on a $600.00 card. I also have a non windowed case so it's beauty would have gone unseen. The EVGA kicks just as good butt in games and was $120.00 cheaper.