MSI N280GTX SUPER OC review

The release of the new generation of AMD cards in the form of HD4800 and GT200 for NVIDIA was rather interesting event, since the both companies were preparing new cores for their cards, cores promising ultra-high performance and even better price /performance ratios. The competing models were released almost simultaneously, thus raising many eyebrows with the obvious question behind this act - how do they compare to each other? Since they are interesting to the end user even by themselves alone, they are also destined to determine how much would the price of the older, very successful AMD HD3870 / HD3850 and NVIDIA 8800, 9600 and 9800 models drop. And here are we today about to test the highest NVIDIA model that was released quite recently, namely - the GeForce 280GTX 1GB, represented by MSI N280GTX SUPER OC - one of the most overclocked 280GTX cards on the market.

With the growing popularity of PC gaming through the years, inevitably gaming hardware popularity rose too and the overclock as pleasant and inexpensive way to get some more performance, some more FPS in the favorite game set in. That however changed a tad, since having overclocked computer (or as non-overclockers tend to call it - "fried") became a fad, so all major video card companies began supplying factory overclocked hardware by the bucketful. On the other hand NVIDIA and AMD/ATI as the main gaming video card manufacturers have strict demands as on to what frequencies and PCB's their chips are used. And there is quite logical for that too - highly overclocked cards could cause problems if not properly tested before being released to the public. Some of the problems (such as picture defects , or extremely high waste) would surely tarnish the good name of NVIDIA/AMD, and in case everything had worked out there is the inevitable sales cut made from the share of manufacturers that had complied to company design and released an standard non-overclock card. So in the end permission for making such models is granted only to the biggest NVIDIA and AMD partners, amongst which are MSI and few other. And this is the reason we witness models like MSI N280GTX SUPER OC.

Now, for a closer view of the card.