MSI R7970 Lightning is one of the first really extreme graphics cards based on AMD’s fresh 28nm GPU Tahiti XT. Three-fold Swedish champion in overclocking Jon ”elmor” Sandström has shown what the card is capable of by reaching a GPU frequency of crazy 1.8 GHz.

AMD Radeon HD 7970 ships from factory with a pretty high frequency of 925 MHz, but also plenty of overclocking potential. Just using regular cooling and stock voltage we reached a stable clock at 1165 MHz. This is nothing compared to what elmor has done.

By throwing on a LN2 pot and feeding the graphics card with liquid nitrogen elmor could raise the GPU voltage to staggering 1.7V. This resulted in a final GPU frequency at almost unimaginable 1800 MHz and a memory clock at 7700 MHz.

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The card stable enough to run through a turn of 3Dmark 11 and with a Core i7-3960X CPU at 5.2 GHz the socre was just as impressive. In Performance Preset elmor scored P15035 points with a single graphics card. The system consisted of a MSI Big Bang XPower II motherboard with 4x1GB DDR3 memory operating at 2314 MHz.

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We will be looking closer at MSI R7970 Lightning here at NordicHardware with more overclocking to follow. Even if AMD will have a hard time keeping the performance crown there is plenty of power to collect for those with basic knowledge of overclocking.

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