MSI N580GTX Lightning XE 3GB SLI Video Card Review @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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MSI N580GTX Lightning XE 3GB SLI Video Card Review - Two MSI N580GTX Lightning XE 3GB video cards in SLI! Tested in NV Surround. We are going to find out if these 3GB video cards hold an advantage over two GeForce GTX 580's and two Radeon HD 6970's. This is the most VRAM per video card we have ever gamed with. We test with seven games, including the new F.3.A.R.
 
That review is scary because I never really thought that 2 gigs of VRAM wouldn't be enough. Oh well, good thing that i'm stuck with only one display until I can figure out how to clear enough room to setup a multiple monitor setup.

As always, great review and it is nice to see Fear 3 included. I never thought that Fear 3 would be pushing these high end systems like I am seeing here.
 
What's with the "Ahem, AMD" in the conclusion? If I'm dreaming enthusiast, it'd be 6990/6970 TriFire.
 
Betaboy1983 said:
What's with the "Ahem, AMD" in the conclusion? If I'm dreaming enthusiast, it'd be 6990/6970 TriFire.
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and yet would still only have 2 gigs of ram available. sure you would have the gpu performance to crank up a lot of settings higher then you are seeing in this review. but the extra gig of ram on the over priced gtx 580 3GB cards shows it makes a difference when it comes to AA settings in games. which is what the whole point of this review was.

but even so i'd still rather have the lower power usage and the extra 500 dollars in my pocket vs being able to run 8x msaa instead of 4x msaa. but thats just me.
 
Betaboy1983 said:
What's with the "Ahem, AMD" in the conclusion? If I'm dreaming enthusiast, it'd be 6990/6970 TriFire.
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For less money even. However, at the triple monitor resolutions, even 2Gb is starting to be too little. Being ram limited in tri-fire would not be an uncommon situation.
 
It was A LOT of money, but my two Xtreme Editions are amazing cards. They run great, quiet, and look amazing.
 
Wow, I had no idea I could crank the AA up that high in Warhead, sure enough they ran it smooth as silk. Overclocked to 915Mghz each, running enthusiast shader with blur set to high performed just as well with 16x AA @ 5760x1080, averaging about 34-35 average on frame rates. Much rather sacrifice shader quality anyways for a few extra fps though.

Finally got my new desk:

Crysis_maddness.jpg
 
Betaboy1983 said:
What's with the "Ahem, AMD" in the conclusion? If I'm dreaming enthusiast, it'd be 6990/6970 TriFire.
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Replace "ahem," with "such as" and you'll get the intended meaning of the sentence.

sirmonkey1985 said:
and yet would still only have 2 gigs of ram available. sure you would have the gpu performance to crank up a lot of settings higher then you are seeing in this review. but the extra gig of ram on the over priced gtx 580 3GB cards shows it makes a difference when it comes to AA settings in games. which is what the whole point of this review was.

but even so i'd still rather have the lower power usage and the extra 500 dollars in my pocket vs being able to run 8x msaa instead of 4x msaa. but thats just me.
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I'd be interested to know if 2GB would be enough memory for the 580 SLI setup to achieve this performance or if 2GB is still too little; unfortunately there's no way to test that. I'd also be interested to know how much the overclock is helping these cards since the increase in memory bandwith, while small, would be particularly helpful.
 
I wonder what would happen if MSI put 3 gigs of ram on a 6970, how much would performance rise? and cost?
 
That was amazing. Dream cards there :p Really good showing for the 6970's though. MSi did some excellent changes there, have been truly impressed with their work. I hope to own one of their cards in the future.
 
Awesome review. I was surprised to see 2GB VRAM being a bottleneck as well.

Betaboy1983 said:
What's with the "Ahem, AMD" in the conclusion? If I'm dreaming enthusiast, it'd be 6990/6970 TriFire.
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Yeah there's really nothing that can beat the value of 6990+6970 trifire:
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I'd personally be just happy with 6970 Crossfire.
 
Meh, 4 hd 6950s or 4 hd 6970s($200 more I know) or 2 of these. Personally I would go for the amd cards since 2 already perform quite close in most instances. I was expecting more raw power from the 580s with more vram, but I guess not. Good review, but these cards aren't that amazing unless you buy 3-4 and play with 3x30".
 
Awesome performance. I, however, would save the $500, or actually, I'd save $150 and get a 3rd 6970. Overall a great article. I just can't believe how close the 6970s continue to be while these 580s are $500 more.
 
Thanks for the review. Tempting, if I weren't 7 months into these 1.5 GB 580s I'd go for it but I think I wait it out now but here's hoping that the standard memory configs on the next high-end cards is at least 3GB hopefully even higher.
 
What really made the decision for me was the fact that running trifire would be hella loud without throwing on the extra expense for liquid cooling. My 580 XE SLI setup has very acceptable noise levels in comparison to trifire videos that I have seen; both 6990+6970 & 6970x3 just sound horrendous to me.
 
ObyTwo said:
Replace "ahem," with "such as" and you'll get the intended meaning of the sentence.



I'd be interested to know if 2GB would be enough memory for the 580 SLI setup to achieve this performance or if 2GB is still too little; unfortunately there's no way to test that. I'd also be interested to know how much the overclock is helping these cards since the increase in memory bandwith, while small, would be particularly helpful.
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look at the numbers again and you can pretty much pinpoint the differences between 2GB and 3GB. whether the games are actually using all 3GB of ram is a different story but the ones where they are able to run higher AA settings then the 6970 setup are obviously using more than 2GB of ram but it could be 2.1GB 2.3GB but there is no way to accurately check that. evga precision is about as close as it gets to being able to monitor video memory usage but from what i've seen i don't think its all that accurate.


Flyinfinni said:
Awesome performance. I, however, would save the $500, or actually, I'd save $150 and get a 3rd 6970. Overall a great article. I just can't believe how close the 6970s continue to be while these 580s are $500 more.
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more then anything i think this shows how much overhead SLI actually has and how much work AMD/ATI has put into fixing their crossfire overhead. because if you look at single card performance the GTX 580 does a pretty good job against the 6970 but in multi-card they almost match eachother perfectly. so obviously Nvidia is looking at the single card performance and pricing it for that which makes sense since SLI/CFX are a niche market for both companies.

heres a comparison, look at the difference between the same cards in single card form, then look at the SLI/CFX performance review.
http://hardocp.com/article/2011/06/02/msi_n580gtx_lightning_video_card_review/

the single card handily beats the 6970 yet in cfx they are almost identical.
 
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I would have liked to see what the 6970 in tri-fire could do against the GTX580 3GB. Those setups would be closer in price.
Thanks for the great review! As usual!
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
the single card handily beats the 6970 yet in cfx they are almost identical.
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In all of our testing though, we did feel that SLI felt smoother to us than CFX at 5760x1200. DiRT 3 was the worse for CFX at this resolution, the performance driving did not feel like the framerate being shown. Metro 2033 was a bit more choppy with CFX than GTX 580 SLI as well. What we've noticed, is that the two 3GB GTX 580 video cards simply felt the smoothest in every game we tested.
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I don't have a CF setup to make my own judgments but it sounds like the numbers in this case may not be telling the whole story.
 
Nvidia really dropped the ball with these 1.5GB max video cards this generation, these Johnny-come-lately priced out the ass cards notwithstanding. I'm just going to roll with a budget option (560 2GB SLI) until they do better next time, hopefully, in six months.

I'm not interested in paying a premium for their mistakes, personally.
 
Nice review... it's a shame it took them this long to release them however. It's also interesting how much less power the MSI cards draw compared to regular 580s.

Also, thanks for doing a 3GB SLI review using multiple monitors. There are so many other useless reviews out there doing nearly identical reviews, and not telling us anything new.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
look at the numbers again and you can pretty much pinpoint the differences between 2GB and 3GB. whether the games are actually using all 3GB of ram is a different story but the ones where they are able to run higher AA settings then the 6970 setup are obviously using more than 2GB of ram but it could be 2.1GB 2.3GB but there is no way to accurately check that. evga precision is about as close as it gets to being able to monitor video memory usage but from what i've seen i don't think its all that accurate.
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The architectural differences (not to mention the fact that these cards are also overclocked) introduce too many variables to claim that the increased memory capacity is the sole cause for the increase in performance, I think.
 
Man, that review is sick. Makes me wish I had two of these babies in my system.

Unfortunately, most of the sites stocking this are out of stock and we may never see one in stock for months.
 
You know... There is a crowd to cater to that isn't in the top 5% "richest people" list.

Maybe more reviews for them? Ya know - like in the old days before video cards topped 300 dollars?
 
darkstarcow said:
I don't see a 6750 review in that list....




please don't hurt me, the jokes, they just type themselves.
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We started cutting off our video card reviews at around $125 years ago, BECAUSE NOBODY READS THOSE. Costs us money to write all these, and when no one reads them, we don't write those any more.
 
I am surprised at the $125 mark, would think $175-200. Hopefully MSI has shown Nvidia how not to gimp cards with not enough memory. The prospect of 3-4GB on high end cards next product launch is looking pretty good I think.
 
wouldn't it have been better to clock down the lightning 3GB cards to vanilla 580s speeds to isolate the extra framebuffer benefit all else being equal?

i dunno maybe i've been studying too much calculus...

overall it makes sense, that the extra framebuffer is needed or there needs to be better algorithms to fix jagged edges without humungous amounts of high res textures
 
Why was The Witcher 2 not used in the review?

Thought that was going to be a new review game.
 
Nice review guys :)

Just seems like for $500 extra you don't really get $500 worth of performance. Those 6970's are hard to beat at that price point.
 
Thanks for the review, this is what I was waiting for. I can confirm what you guys wrote about the top card getting hotter even if they're double-spaced like you did, my top 6950 is 10* C hotter than the bottom one even though its fan blows 20% harder and it runs at 1.063 V, 30 mV less than the bottom card. There really is no avoiding it (unless you use ribbon cables) multiple GPUs introduce a lot of heat. :(

Godmachine said:
Nice review guys :)

Just seems like for $500 extra you don't really get $500 worth of performance. Those 6970's are hard to beat at that price point.
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Seriously. This review didn't say as much about the how insanely fast the 580 3GB is as how *almost* insanely fast regular 6970s are, and they cost almost half as much to roll out compared to 580 3GB SLI. I mean really...
 
Real nice review just wondering two things.

Howe dose the 3GB 580s compare to Tri-CF. (as that's about the same price as this setup)

And how dose OC change the picture as, as good as ATi cards are, they have way less benefit from a OC.

Not that I am going to buy any of these cards, as I am happy with my Eyefinity Tri-CF 5870 2GB Matrix setup for now, and will not upgrade till I need to do it.

ps. I was real glad that I went for the 2GB Matrix cards, as they work a lot better then the 1GB version, and did not need to upgrade.
Milling the waterbloks to fit the Matrix was a pain do!
 
Pardon me for asking, but where there any Civilization 5 results? There had been talk in your earlier reviews about how the extra .5GB was pivotal to the game, and I was wondering what a full 3GB did for it.
 
After much tweaking and some decent driver updates I stand behind my 6970 x-fire purchase. Not to say that these new 580's aren't sweet as hell, but I'd rather roll that extra cash into other hardware or a 30" monitor.

Just my two pennies.
 
XacTactX said:
Seriously. This review didn't say as much about the how insanely fast the 580 3GB is as how *almost* insanely fast regular 6970s are, and they cost almost half as much to roll out compared to 580 3GB SLI. I mean really...
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I can understand that, though: you're looking at the highest-end segment, which means you're also looking at highest-end consumers for whom cost is not a major concern.
 
TaHoward said:
What really made the decision for me was the fact that running trifire would be hella loud without throwing on the extra expense for liquid cooling. My 580 XE SLI setup has very acceptable noise levels in comparison to trifire videos that I have seen; both 6990+6970 & 6970x3 just sound horrendous to me.
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I was thinking the same thing, but I think that has more to do with the fact that they are stock coolers.

That is why I was considering the MSI R6970 Lightning's as they have the same cooler...

Now I am thinking two 3 GB 580's again... But damn, so much money...

Question to those of you with hands on experience with these video cards. Is there any way to turn off the LED's? I hate it when my computer spews out light.
 
Why are we not seeing this setup compared to a 6990 and 6970 in tri-fire? Lower cost, same 2 card setup. If the goal is really to stop looking at number of GPU's and look at number of cards and bang for the buck, this review is a failure. A 6990 with a 6970 is still cheaper than 2 of these MSI cards by a not insignificant $200 and would require the exact same 2 pcie slots...Seems extremely short sighted.
 
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