You can see the AirForce overclocking panel on the pictures below. It can be installed either to an empty 5 ¼” bay from you case or to your desktop, as shown on Figures 13 and 14. The panel is installed to the motherboard using a USB port. The panel comes with two kinds of cables: a cable to install the panel to an internal USB header, if you are going to use the panel on your case, or a cable to install the panel to a standard external USB port, if you are going to use the panel on your desk. After installing the panel you need to install a program from MSI called Lightning in order to make the panel work.

The installation is easy, however the cable for installing the panel on your desk is simply too short. At only three feet (90 cm) it is impossible for you to install the panel on your desk. MSI should have included a cable with at least six feet (1.80 m).

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Figure 11: AirForce panel.

The panel has a series of LED’s that indicate the current overclocking level. There are touch buttons marked + and – for you to increase or decrease each parameter, which includes GPU (core) voltage, memory voltage, GPU (core) clock, memory clock and processors (shader) clock, respectively. The voltage buttons also change the brightness and contrast of the screen, when the button “Theater” is pressed.

AirForce comes with three preset configurations: “Game,” which is the default video card configuration, making it to run at the specs already published (655 MHz for the GPU, 1,404 MHz for the processors and 1 GHz for the memory). Hitting “Office” makes the video card to lower its clock rates to 350 MHz core, 700 MHz shader and 600 MHz memory. And hitting “Power Saving” makes it go to 300 MHz core, 600 MHz shader and 100 MHz memory. In theory these other two presets allow you to save energy. We will measure this during our tests.

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Figure 12: Buttons and LED’s present on AirForce panel.

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Figure 13: AirForce panel installed on our desk.

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Figure 14: AirForce panel in action.

The “Lightning” button on the panel brings up the Lightning application from MSI showing the current clock rates from the video card. This screen is shown for only three seconds, however MSI launched a new version where this limitation was removed (click here to download it).

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Figure 15: Lightning application.

The buttons, however, don’t work well. You have to press them really hard and several times until the command is understood. It is probably a flaw on the type of switch MSI used. This could be easily solved by using regular buttons instead of this “touch” type.