Fastest GTX780 in the world: MSI Lightning spy photos

MSI’s GTX780 Lightning is set to be the world’s fastest GTX780, rubbing shoulders with its bigger GTX Titan brother. Ahead of its launch date, which has yet to be determined, leaked spy photos show off the cooler for the first time and detail some interesting aspects of the card’s layout.

HardwareZone forums leaked the pictures onto the internet before they could be taken down by request, but they have been saved and uploaded here for viewing. The GTX780 Lightning is longer than the reference PCB by about an inch and features a metal heat shroud, aluminium backplate, and two SLI fingers, allowing you to put four of these together to push a serious amount of pixels around.

The front houses two 100mm and one 80mm fans, with the middle one coloured yellow and surrounded by a few yellow stripes which are meant to match the colour scheme of MSI’s MPower motherboards. Beneath the shroud is the fan housing which bolts onto the heatsink, which not only has a large copper block placed on the GPU chip, but also has no less than seven heatpipes.

All in all, just by the pictures, we can guess that the card weighs about a kilogram and will require a sturdy chassis to house it properly. Underneath the cooler is a completely custom circuit board which houses a 20-phase PWM bank, two 8-pin PEG connectors (the standard GTX780 uses one 8-pin and one 6-pin), a set of hand-picked chokes, measuring points for voltages.

The card has three BIOS options to boot with, a MSI badge on the back that dims and brightens according to GPU load, MSI’s GPU Reactor technology to reduce coil whine and a staggering price, according to WCCF Tech, set to be US $1,000 at launch. It will be the fastest and most expensive custom GTX780 in the world.

MSI says on the box that the GTX780 Lightning is built to be perfect. I’d say they pretty much nailed it so far.