MSI GeForce GTX 280 OC Graphics Card
Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Our Rating: 92% Manufacturer: MSI
The Card
With the package out of the way, it’s time to move onto the card. Out of the box it looks like every other GTX 280 with the reference cooler managing to take up the whole card.
We can see that the only thing MSI has done to the card is place its own sticker on it. We have a branded sticker of the fan along with another sticker that shows what we saw on the front of the box along with the brand and model. We also again see the "Game with MSI" logo at the bottom.
Turning the card over, there isn’t a whole lot going on. We have some vents to let the hot air out, but apart from that it’s a sea of black.
As you would expect, looking around the card we have the two power connectors located at the top of the card; one being a 6-pin and the other an 8-pin. Next to these connectors we have another port for the loop back cable included in the box so that you can get sound through the HDMI convertor included.
Continuing across the top of the card, we have our two SLI connectors which of course give us support for up to three cards if your budget stretches that far. Don’t forget, though, you of course need a motherboard that supports Tri SLI to use them.
Getting to the I/O department, we have two Dual Link DVI connectors and a TV-Out port. We also have some vents for the hot air to escape and a light up the top that lets us know that the card is up and running.
Specifications
As we have mentioned before, the card is of course an overclocked one like we saw mentioned on the front of the box. Instead of the stock 600MHz core, MSI have chosen to bump this to 650MHz. The 1GB of GDDR3 memory has moved from 2200MHz DDR to 2300MHz DDR.
It’s not a huge overclock, but should give us a little boost in performance compared to a card based on stock clocks.
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