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MSI NX8800GT Graphics Card Review

Posted By: Hardware Tech Review Published in Graphics Card

Dec

The constant clash between NVIDIA and ATI is something that many have already known for quite a while. It was only last year that ATI was acquired by AMD, but that didn’t change the fact that NVIDIA would be still facing a strong competition. When AMD was set to launch their HD 2600 cards, NVIDIA had beaten them by releasing the 8600 range. And now, NVIDIA has done it again. As AMD was about to release their latest RV670 cards, NVIDIA brought in the Geforce 8800GT, which may be the best graphics card the world has yet to see.

Before we can get down to the specifics of the card, we take a look inside the box to see what goodies MSI gave. Considering that home theater PCs and high definition videos are the ‘in’ thing now, we had hoped to see a HDMI port on the card but it only has two DVI ports, which isn’t a total let down. Unfortunately, MSI didn’t provide any HDMI-DVI dongle or a HDMI cable. We see some of the familiar stuff like the S-Video cable, component cable, dual Molex-to-PCIe power cable and a VGA-DVI dongle. MSI didn’t include a free game, so we hope they would in the future.

MSI NX8800GT Graphics Card Review

Since the card is very new, nothing has been done to the card physically; it’s basically the stock card with a different sticker. The card’s design followed the single-slot design that was used a while back. This greatly benefits everyone as now we don’t have to worry about any PCIe slots being blocked. The card uses a longer heatsink rather than a thick one, so it spans across the whole PCB. But because it’s flat now, manufacturers are limited to small cooling fans, which don’t do an effective job in cooling the card. The card reached a maximum temperature of 90°C during testing.

MSI has done a bit of tweaking but it isn’t that much. The G92 GPU runs at 660MHZ while its 512MB memory has a clockspeed of 950MHZ, signifying a 5-10% boost in overall performance. Some of the features that we like to reiterate from the ASUS EN8800GT article is the fact that it support PCI Express 2.0 as well as the PureVideo 2 integration.