MSI’s new R6970 Lightning will set you back about $80 more than a stock card which gets you an 80MHz GPU overclock, though the GDDR5 remains at the stock speed of 5.5GHz effective.  Don’t turn your nose up right away, the clocks are similar but the PCB is completely redone and all components follow MSI’s Military Class II specs which give you a vastly improved platform to crank up the voltage and frequency, helped by the custom cooling solution.  [H]ard|OCP broke 1GHz on the GPU and an additional 280MHz effective on the RAM which noticeably improved their experience.  This is definitely one worth checking out.

"MSI’s Latest Lightning series, the R6970 Lightning is here, based on an AMD Radeon HD 6970 with 2GB of GDDR5. It is only moderately overclocked out of the box, but its hardware quality may just knock the ball out of the park. Come with us as we test it against the stock Radeon HD 6970 and the GeForce GTX 570."

Here are some more Graphics Card articles from around the web:

Graphics Cards