A meet and greet with the MSI N260GTX Lightning 1792 MB BE

On the next few pages we'll show you some photos. The images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon 450D 12 MegaPixel.

So here we have the packaging. Nicely done, feels very luxurious actually. Bundled is obviously the 1792MB graphics card, AirForce panel, cabling, HDMI and DVI adapters and then the drivers/software and manuals.

But this is what it is all about. Check out that design. Looking good huh ? Let's run through all the components one by one, starting with the graphics card itself.

So here we have the MSI N260GTX Lightning 1792 MB graphics card. Remember the Airforce panel is optional, and comes with the limited Black Edition bundle.

The N260GTX Lightning and N260GTX Lightning Black Edition comes with a nice custom design PCB. We spot solid jap caps, a voltage regulator circuit with 10 phases (8 phases are reserved for the GPU and 2 phases for the memory). MSI's Lightning edition features 1792MB of GDDR3 memory - putting it on par in terms of quantity with a GeForce GTX 295.

The look and feel of the card is dark and mysterious, it's loaded with small subtleties, look at the front panel with MSI stamped in there.

On the connectivity side of things we certainly can not complain. That's standard analog VGA aka D-Sub, then Dual-link DVI and all the way to the left we see a HDMI connector.

Dual-link: A lot of people still think this means two DVI connectors. No it means that you can hook up monitors with very high resolutions (1920x1200 up-to 2560x1600).