It appears that MSI is preparing to bring back its Lightning graphics cards, following recent teasers across its social channels. This would signal the end of a near-decade-long absence for the series, with the last Lightning card hitting the scene way back in 2018.
On X and Facebook, MSI has uploaded banners of a faux weather forecast without any further context. Running from December 30 to January 5, the latter date marking the beginning of CES 2026, the brand predicts a burst of lightning come that fateful Monday.
This tease arrives almost a year after the announcement of MSI’s GeForce RTX 5090 ‘Special Edition’ cards, complete with thunderbolt strike-styled typefaces, back at CES 2025. Given this context, it looks likely that MSI is intending to bring back its Lightning series.
There are other indications that MSI had a special graphics card in the works too, with the MSI Afterburner developer claiming to have seen a card with “unlocked extended voltage control” earlier this year. This card could be arriving just in time to challenge the Asus GeForce RTX 5090 ROG Matrix for the overclocking crown, hopefully without similar quality control issues.
Should MSI maintain the same designs it shared back at CES 2025, we expect to see variants of the Lightning card cooled by both air and liquid. I say ‘card’ singular here, as the brand only shared materials relating to a GeForce RTX 5090, and I’m also relatively confident we won’t see these designs trickle down to less-powerful SKUs.
There are no official details regarding the specs of these new MSI Lightning cards, but it’s safe to presume they’ll arrive with a substantial factory overclock. For the moment, MSI’s best effort in this regard is a 2,580MHz boost clock on its GeForce RTX 5090 Suprim card. That’s 173MHz above stock, so here’s hoping the brand can at least breach 200MHz out of the box.
In any case, I’m excited to see what overclockers can do with a prospective GeForce RTX 5090 Lightning, as that’s ultimately the target audience for this card. As such, I’d expect to see MSI produce relatively few of these models, with a hefty price tag befitting their scarcity and specification.
Assuming MSI pulls back the curtain on its latest Lightning card at CES 2026, you can expect coverage from us right from the show floor. Make sure you’re following the Club386 Google News feed and have the site set up as a Google Preferred Source so you stay in the loop.
