Introduction

If you, like us were impressed with what the MSI HD 6970 Lightning offered which we looked at just the other day here, yet you're happy to spend some more to jump on the fastest single GPU card on the market, then we might just have the card for you.

Kicking it up a notch in price and performance, the MSI GTX 580 Lightning could well be the card for you, being of course based on the high end GTX 580 GPU. The Lightning series is all about overclocking, though, so we want to find out just what this series can do for the GTX 580.

Before we get into all the fun stuff, though, let's first check out the package. Once that's done we'll have a look at the card itself and the overclock we managed to achieve. Then we'll of course get into the performance side of things to see exactly what the MSI GTX 580 Lightning is able to offer.

Package

Looking at the bundle, we've of course got that typical Lightning bundle on offer which offers the normal VGA extras like paperwork, driver CD and DVI to VGA connector. We've also got two 6-Pin to 8-Pin PCI-E power connectors, three voltage measuring cables and two extra-long SLI connectors.