Hi guys and gals,
While you wait for MSI HD5870 Lightning, why don't you read a bit about it's smaller brother, R5770 Hawk?
This is not going to be a regular review - no benchmarks or price-performance ratio calculations. I'm going to focus on overclocking.

1. The card
The card is a non-reference design, with custom PCB and cooler:


Connectivity is almost the same as on reference HD5770:
  • 1x DVI
  • 1x HDMI
  • 1x DisplayPort

It needs one PCI-E 6-pin +12V plug.
The extra feature vs reference card are voltage read points. MSI bundles one voltage readout cable, which you can plug to either of two headers, one for memory voltage and one for GPU voltage:


PCB has an unusual layout. GPU voltage regulator is located between I/O plate and the GPU, and memory regulator is, as usual, on the back, near PCI-E connector.


GPU voltage regulator is built around uPI Semi uP6204 controller.
Contrary to what MSI said in their press release, there's no "7+1-Phase Power Architecture".
uP6204 is a three phase controller, here implemented with double set of inductors and mosfets in each phase.
This makes a nice and powerful power setup, good enough not to need "phase frenzy" marketing talk.
for MSI engineers, for marketing guys.
There are also two single phase converters using uP6101 controllers, one for Vddci (GPU memory controller voltage) and one for Vmem (memory voltage).


MSI has chosen to use Samsung memory.