MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition 3GB - The Fastest Single GPU for BF3?

[siopao1984]

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Buyer's Guide: MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition 3GB - The Fastest Single GPU for BF3? by VR-Zone.com

There are plenty of reasons why anyone would only want a single graphics card in their system - limited space in SFF motherboards/enclosures, power consumption considerations, and input lag or framerate stuttering with some multi-GPU setups. Before Battlefield 3 launches officially next Tuesday (25th October 2011), we take a quick look on whether the MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition is best single GPU weapon for your online battlefield domination.

Introduction

Earlier this month, the highly anticipated Battlefield 3 multiplayer open beta introduced revolutionary new levels of DirectX 11 graphics quality and detail in the game environments, obsoleting many older hardware in the process and triggering a mad rush to upgrade to higher grades of graphics cards and CPUs in order to get comfortable and consistent framerates.

As covered by our BF3 system builder guide, we mentioned that the game demands at least a 3GHz Quad Core processor such as Intel's Core i5/i7 and AMD's Phenom II/FX Bulldozer class of CPUs to not be bottlenecked by it. Scaling the number of CPU cores/threads/modules, or overclocking the working frequency did not show much noticable improvement beyond that.

Things were more exciting on the GPU end though as we saw almost linear FPS scaling when we varied the number of cards, shaders, clock speeds and memory bandwidth. GPU usage was walling at 99% - something we haven't seen in games except the original Crysis and stress test burners. For example, we tested that a dual SLi setup (ultra image quality) get almost 90% more FPS (~95fps) than a single card (~50fps), a tri-SLi setup get 170% more (~135fps), and a quad SLi 250% more (~175fps). We'll be testing this again when the final retail game is released, with the latest drivers.



There are plenty of reasons why some end users and competitive gamers would want only a single GPU graphics card:

• Lack of space and cooling capacity in cramped small form factor cases/motherboards
• Power Consumption of Multiple Cards
• "Good Enough" for lower resolutions / image quality presets
• Mouse Input Lag, framerate jitter and micro stuttering caused by certain bridge chips implementations and the concept of AFR (alternate frame rendering) itself which is used in both SLi and Crossfire.

Today, we'll be doing a quick look on the MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition 3GB that we will be using in some of our upcoming BF3 articles. Simply put, the card in hand belongs to the pinnacle of off the shelf air-cooled gaming graphics cards, bar multi-GPU behemoths like the Nvidia GTX590 and the AMD Radeon 6990. As the final Battlefield 3 game is not released yet, we will be doing some max air overclocking and running a few demanding benchmarks in preparation for the main event next week..



The Packaging

Front of Box


Inset of Box (with a transparent window to see the card)


Back of Box


Accessories (PCIe 6 to 8 pin convertors, Analog to DVI dongle, SLi Bridges, Installation CD and a User Guide)

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The Card

Front of Card - we see the iconic MSI Twin Frozr III dual 80mm fan heatpipe design which is much less audible and achieves cooler temperatures than the reference GTX580 blower design.



Back of Card - filled with NEC Proadlizer*4, Copper MOS and other engineering niceties to improve power regulation and extreme overclocking. There is also a dual bios switch for those who need consequence-free bios flashing experimentation.



Gold Plated Display Connectors - Dual-link DVI x 2, HDMI x 1 and DisplayPort x 1.



The card takes up two slots (instead of three on some non-reference designs by other manufacturers) and there are three voltage measuring points for vGPU and vMem.



Requires 2x 8pin PCIe Connectors - which implies up to 300W of power pull in addition to the 75W from the motherboard.



Blue LED lights while in operation. Also, during initial cold boots, the fans will spin in reverse for a few seconds to try to remove dust build up in the heatsinks.




Test Setup



CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K @ 4.8GHz
Motherboard: MSI Z68A-GD80 B3 (our review)
RAMs: 2 x 4GB G.Skills RipJawsX 1600Mhz 9-9-9-28 1T
HSF: Thermalright Silver Arrow with 2 Fans
SSD: Corsair X128 SSD
PSU: CM Silent Pro M 1000W
OS: Windows 7 x64 with SP1
Nvidia Driver: 285.38

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Overclocking

Stock Clocks and Settings



We used the excellent MSI Afterburner 2.20 Beta 8 and with just an additional +200mV to the core voltage and the fan speeds set to max, got an overclock of 970MHz (16.5%) on the core and 2500Mhz (19%) on the memory



Additional Settings to unlock voltage control and monitoring



During the overclocking process to test for visual artifacts and stability, we used MSI Kombustor (Furmark) in DX11 Xtreme burn-in mode to stress the card. Maximum temperatures recorded was 60 degrees Celcius, which is excellent.



Benchmarks

3DMark 11 Stock Clocks


3DMark 11 Overclocked (16.2% improvement)


Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.5 Stock Clocks


Unigine Heaven Benchmark 2.5 Overclocked (17.3% improvement)


Street Fighter 4 Stock Clocks


Street Fighter 4 Overclocked (15.8% improvement)


Alien vs Predator DX11 Benchmark

Resolution: 1920 x 1200
Texture Quality: 3
Shadow Quality: 3
Anisotropic Filtering: 16
SSAO: ON
Vertical Sync: OFF
DX11 Tessellation: ON
DX11 Advanced Shadows: ON
DX11 MSAA Samples: 4

[IMG][/IMG]

Conclusion:

Pedantic readers would have noticed that we didn't bring in other cards for head to head comparison, which isn't the point since this is not a formal platform review but more of a max O/C case study. The overclocks achieved on the core and the memory are in the ballpark zone of what the better air cooled non-reference GTX580 cards in the market can do. We have also proved that increasing the clock speeds in horsepower/bandwidth starved scenarios does help the framerates - which is important since Battlefield 3 is heavy on the GPU.

If you are looking to get the MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition 3GB, it is available in stores for USD$594/SGD795 - a bit less expensive than the top end non-reference GTX580 models of other brands. The Twin Frozr III cooling solution and the well designed PCB also helps to keep the GF110 Fermi cool under load without creating a loud ruckus. It also has 3GB of memory framebuffer, which is more than enough (~1.5GB) if you are running Battlefield 3 in the 1080p Ultra Quality Preset. Without a doubt, we recommend this card if you need the ultimate single card/gpu for your BF3 gaming rig and don't mind paying a bit of a premium over reference designs.



Next up, we'll be looking at capable BF3 gaming laptops and high end multi-GPU solutions for 3D 1080p/multi-monitor gaming!