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Flipping the Lightning…DIP Switches Aplenty Flipping the Lightning…DIP Switches Aplenty Turning the Lightning over reveals a PCB that is far from the reference design in every way possible. Instead of lengthening the PCB to incorporate their high end components, MSI has added extra width by incorporating a small ˝” lip on the card’s leading edge.  MSI has gone the same route as Gigbayte does with their Super Overclock series by equipping the Lightning with a quartet of NEC / Tokin Proadlizer. Laid out in a 3+1 GPU to memory configuration, these chips provide high capacitance and low ESR to ensure the cleanest power possible gets to each section of the graphics card while providing 1000 uF of capacitance.   Along the PCB’s edge are three DIP switches with a fourth being located near the PCI-E slot connector. The main grouping of three includes an OPC Unlocker that allows the core to ignore any power limiter that has been placed upon it, a V-Switch for quick voltage tuning and a PWM Clock Tuner which essentially overclocks the PWM clock to 310Mhz from the reference 260Mhz. The fourth switch is dubbed XtremeCool for working around the GTX 580’s “cold bug” and should be used when overclocking with LN2.  Next to the three main DIP switches is a toggle used for quick BIOS switching. The Lightning holds two BIOSes onboard; one of which houses the standard overclocked file and another which is tailor-made for high end cooling solutions since it implements aggressive voltage presets. When used in conjunction with the XtremeCool toggle, this should allow extreme overclockers to completely bypass the dreaded GF110 cold bug. Naturally, these are only the most visible features which hint at the Lightning’s overclocking prowess. Below the heatsink, there is a long list of upgraded components that will allow overclockers to really push this card to its absolute limits. | ||||
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