MSI R7970 Lightning Radeon HD 7970 3GB Video Card Review

R7970 Lighting Retail Box and Bundle

The retail box for the MSI R7970 Lighting video card lists the main
features that the card (17 Phase PWM Design, Triple Overvoltage, Twin Frozr IV and Unlocked Digital Power).

Turning the retail box over, we see even more marketing
text in many different languages and more details on the main features of this video card.

The MSI R7970 Lightning retail box even has a cover flap that opens that shows you even more details on the card. After reading all about the features on the box, we were shocked to see that nothing was mentioned about the cards warranty on the retail box. The MSI R7970 Lighting is backed by a 3-year warranty and we feel that information should be on the front of the box! MSI didn’t even bother putting it on the box for some odd reason.

Inside the retail box the card is safely packed inside a static bag and then placed in laser cut foam to ensure it arrives in proper working order.

After pulling everything out of the box we laid it all out and took a bundle picture for you. When you buy a MSI R7970 Lighting this is everything that comes with it. You get a quick user’s guide, an owners manual, certificate of quality & stability, a drivers CD, a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, a mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter, two 6-pin PCIe to 8-pin PCIe video card power adapters, a single CrossFire bridge and three probe leads for the voltage check points.

When you fire up the driver DVD that comes with the card you’ll see this GUI that allows you to check out the user manual and install the drivers and utilities if needed. MSI includes demos and soft trial software from Adobe, AIWI, Cyberlink and Norton. We just got this card a week ago, yet the drivers included on the DVD were from December 2011 and were Catalyst 8.921 release candidate drivers. We didn’t use anything off the disk as a newer driver was available online from AMD and MSI
released a new version of Afterburner after they sent the video card for us to review. The usefulness of a software disc is very questionable in this day and age as it adds cost and usually never gets used.