MSI Europe showed a nice screenshot of Elmor’s latest overclocking feat and overclocking experience with MSI’s recently announced HD 7970 Lightning card.

MSI’s Radeon HD 7970 Lightning overclocked up to 1800MHz for the GPU. Apparently all it took was some LN2 and Swedish overclocker Elmor, which proved his OC skills at various overclocking events.

The card was normally chilled by LN2 and stable core clock ended up at 1800MHz with 1700mV of voltage. Memory ended up at impressive 1925MHz (7.7GHz effective). Elmor used MSI’s Big Bang XPower II X79 motherboard and Intel Core i7 3960X Sandy Bridge-E CPU overclocked to 5207.8MHz. The 3DMark 11 score ended at 15035 marks in Performance mode.

MSI has definitely made dream graphics card for any overclocker and that custom PCB is surely doing a nice job.

Click for full resolution screenshot.

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Europe’s own KFA2 is readying the release of a hot new GeForce GTX 480 model which is not ‘only’ factory overclocked, but comes equipped with Arctic’s Accelero Extreme Plus VGA cooler that packs three 92mm fans and five copper heatpipes.

Dubbed GeForce GTX 480 LTD OC Anarchy, the DirectX 11 card in question has 480 CUDA Cores, a GPU clock of 760 MHz, a shader frequency of 1520 MHz, a 384-bit memory interface, 1.5GB of VRAM @ 3800 MHz, and dual-DVI, plus HDMI outputs. No word on pricing yet.

If you want a REALLY fast pre-overclocked GeForce GTX 460 then Point of View might have the answer for you as they are releasing the BEAST. No-no seriously .. it’s branded as Beast.

The Beast series are of highest and yield graphics cards and feature stability even beyond the documented clock settings of 855 MHz core clock, 1710 MHz shader clock and 4020 MHz memory clock (1005 MHz Quad Data rate GDDR-5).

All of the POV/TGT GeForce GTX 460 “BEAST”TM products are hand selected and manually tuned with a proprietary tuning algorithm developed by TGT’s highly skilled hardware and software engineering team.

The POV/TGT GeForce GTX 460 “BEAST” is available with both, 1GB of GDDR-5 display memory as well as with 768MB of GDDR-5 memory at lower cost.

We have no information just yet about pricing. More info here.

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If you bought a regular clocked GeForce GTX 460 from eVGA then good news, they decided to increase the clock frequencies to be a little more competitive. eVGA slapped it all around a marketing program called Free Performance Boost.

This program simply entails a BIOS update applying higher clocks on the GTX 460 SKUs. Here it is, the EVGA 460 FPB Update, changelist as follows:

* Core/Processor clock increased to 720/1440 (Part numbers 768-P3-1360-XX and 01G-P3-1371-XX Only)
* Fanspeed unlocked to allow up to 100%
* Download the correct .zip file below for your graphics card:

768-P3-1360-XX – EVGA GeForce GTX 460
768-P3-1362-XX – EVGA GeForce GTX 460 SuperClocked
01G-P3-1371-XX – EVGA GeForce GTX 460 1024MB EE (External Exhaust)
01G-P3-1373-XX – EVGA GeForce GTX 460 SuperClocked 1024MB EE (External Exhaust)

* Extract the files to a location on disk.
* Make sure no programs are running in the background, and double click update.exe.
* Press “Y” to begin the update.
* DO NOT TURN OFF POWER OR RESET DURING THE FLASH PROCESS!
* After update, restart PC.
* Reinstall the latest NVIDIA graphics drivers after bootup.

Perhaps the next time eVGA .. just OC your cards properly at launch date. It saves your end-users the hassle of forcing firmware upgrades on a graphics card.

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Building on the success of the recently launched ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card – driven by the world’s most powerful graphics processor – AMD today announced availability of a factory overclocked graphics processor that is the first to break the 1 Gigahertz (GHz) barrier using standard air-cooling solutions.

- With this product, AMD achieves a notable engineering milestone as the first graphics company to break the 1 GHz barrier.

- The new ATI Radeon HD 4890 utilizes advanced GDDR5 memory and a 1 GHz clock speed to deliver 1.6 TeraFLOPs of compute power, 50 percent more than that of the competition’s best single-GPU solution. With this level of raw compute power, the1 GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 is set to deliver new levels of general purpose GPU-accelerated performance in ATI Stream applications such as video transcoding and post processing.

- This new version of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 marks the latest addition to the award-winning ATI Radeon HD 4000 series delivered by AMD technology partners Sapphire, XFX, Asus and TUL.

- The advanced design of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 delivers an amazing gaming experience in the latest games, including ground-breaking DirectX 10.1 titles such as Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., Electronic Art’s BattleForge and SEGA’s Stormrise released last month, as well as GSC Gameworld’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky. When compared to DirectX 10 game play, DirectX 10.1 games have proven to deliver higher game performance and an improved visual experience. In addition, these cards feature support for open standards like OpenGL3 with DirectX 10-like hardware extensions, and the recently ratified OpenCL specification.

- The ATI Radeon HD 4890 supports advanced game physics. At the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Havok and AMD demonstrated the first implementation of OpenCL running on AMD graphics processors. In the demonstration, Havok’s physics technology delivered complex and realistic simulations of real-world materials like cloth, demonstrating the potential for increased realism in forthcoming games.

- To date, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 card has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Editor’s Choice Gold Award from HardOCP, the HotHardware Recommended Award and the Editor’s Choice Award from Tweaktown, among others. The accolades speak to the excitement around the product and to the continued strength of the discrete graphics market overall, something analyst Dr. Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research predicts will continue to play a strong role in the computing industry.

- As a result of the worldwide accolades from media, developers, enthusiasts and fans, AMD released an “inside look” at how the card was made and what it means for gamers. The card marks a new aspect to the AMD “Dragon” desktop platform technology, providing an even more powerful single GPU desktop graphics option to OEMs, channel partners, and do-it-yourself (DIY) consumers.

“Throughout the 40-year history of AMD, we have continually focused on technology firsts that deliver superior value to the customer,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president, Products Group, AMD. “The 1GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 continues that tradition by increasing the performance and compute power of our flagship single-GPU solution, ensuring a great experience whether our customers are playing the latest DirectX 10.1 game or running GPU accelerated applications built with OpenCL.”

Ecosystem support

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card is supported by a dozen add-in-board companies offering a variety of custom board and cooling solutions. Technology partners include ASUS, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, Gigabyte, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), ITC, Jetway, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE Technology and XFX.

Here is what partners are saying about the overclocked edition of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card:

“Achieving air-cooled clock speeds of 1 GHz with our Vapor-X cooler immediately puts the new Sapphire HD 4890 Atomic Edition graphics card in an overclocking class of its own,” said Adrian Thomson, vice president, Marketing, Sapphire. “At 150 MHz above stock speeds, this card will unlock new levels of performance and allow gamers to push the latest DirectX 10.1 titles to new highs in image quality and frame rates.”

“XFX is renowned for its ability to design and deliver high-performance graphics products, expertly overclocked to maximize every aspect of the GPU,” said Eddie Memon, senior vice president, Marketing, XFX. “The XFX team was excited to see just how far we could push the 1 GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890. I know our customers are going to love the performance of XFX’s ATI Radeon HD 4890 Black Edition. Hitting 1GHz is an amazing feat, even more so when done in production-level volumes and with overclocking headroom to spare.”

“ASUS has always prided itself on delivering leading technology, and the ASUS EAH4890 Formula Series packs all of the great features and performance gamers crave,” said Kent Chien, associate vice president of graphics and multimedia business, ASUS. “In addition, we are equipping the ASUS EAH4890 Formula Series with Voltage Tweak technology and Super ML Cap, giving gamers the flexibility to boost GPU voltage and achieve as much as an 18 percent performance improvement over factory settings. The ASUS EAH4890 Formula Series and Voltage Tweak is a potent combination.”

“With the PowerColor PCS++ HD4890, we built a truly performant graphics card around the exceptional ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics processor and added our own ZEROtherm cooling system,” said Ted Chen, CEO of TUL Corporation. “The mix of ATI Radeon HD graphics technology and PowerColor design gives our customers enthusiast-level game performance at an affordable price.”

BFG Technologies also is upping the ante with their GeForce GTX 270 series. BFG a North American and European supplier of advanced NVIDIA-based 3D graphics cards, power supplies, and the Phobos™ High-Performance Gaming/Home Theater System, announced today the BFG GeForce® GTX 275 OC™ graphics card that offers outstanding PC gaming performance and advanced processing power in other applications from which even non gamers can benefit.

The BFG GeForce GTX 275 OC with CUDA™ technology provides superior gaming performance as well as advanced GPU computing performance for everything from video transcoding to video and photo editing. Whether it’s transferring HD videos in minutes to your portable video player using the Badaboom™ Media Converter, “upscaling” standard definition movies to near HD quality with Arcsoft SimHD™, or rapidly editing digital photos using Adobe CS4™, the BFG GeForce GTX 275 OC graphics card does it all with outstanding performance and reliability.