MSI HD5870 Lightning Review

It seems that they were able to hit 1034/1351 on air cooling ...

If you are one of those people who only reads reviews of certain products, or dismisses these tweaked models as expensive versions of the reference design, you could be forgiven for wondering why we even bother to test them. After all, we know the Radeon HD5870 is the weapon of choice so why pay the extra for one that's only 50MHz quicker in stock trim? Of course those of us with experience know exactly why we test them. Sometimes you find an absolute gem and sometimes something you go in expecting to be brilliant proves to be quite underpowered. Neither of these apply to the MSI R5870 Lightning, but it's not as cut and dried as it might seem.