![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Friday , August 05, 2005
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
MSI NX7800 GTX SLI Review
We take two retail MSI NX7800 GTX video cards through our gauntlet of gaming evaluations, in single card and SLI mode, to see what kind of gaming experience MSI’s top-of-the-line NVIDIA technology can provide.
Dynamic Overclocking Technology:
Dynamic Overclocking Technology, or D.O.T abbreviated, is MSI’s proprietary software technology to provide higher than standard performance with the GeForce NX7800 GTX. This performance increase is achieved by raising the GPU and memory frequencies at different levels. For more information on D.O.T., click here and look at the left side of the webpage under Product Features.
D.O.T is built into the provided MSI video card drivers. Therefore, you will not receive the benefit of D.O.T if you install reference drivers from NVIDIA’s website. Currently, the latest version of the MSI provided drivers is based on ForceWare 77.50. If you head over to NVIDIA’s website, you will see that the official WHQL ForceWare version is up to 77.72. There is also a newer beta ForceWare 77.76 at NZone with some major bug fixes. Therefore, if you wish to use D.O.T, you will have to use older drivers than what you can get from NVIDIA.
Installation is simple, just run the setup with the MSI driver. It will install the driver normally and then you can reboot. Once you reboot, the installation will attempt to install two components, SW20.EXE and SW24.EXE. These executable files are the MSI D.O.T components. If you are running Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, you may get a security warning as we did, which you can see in the above screen shot. Simply uncheck the check box that says “Always ask before opening this file” and then click Run. The dialog box will not pop up anymore after that. Once you have done that, D.O.T will not be visible in the Display Properties.
You will have two new tabs under Display Properties, MSI Information and MSI Clock. The MSI Information tab gives you a general rundown of information about your video card such as the bus information, BIOS, type of memory, and driver version. If you click on the Advance button, you will receive more detailed information on the bus and device ID numbers.
The MSI Clock tab contains the options for D.O.T. To enable D.O.T, all you have to do is check the option that says D.O.T Enable, and then select the mode you want. They are labeled from one through six and go from Private to Commander. Each level indicates a percentage of performance increase: Private (2%), Sergeant (4%), Captain (6%), Colonel (8%), General (9%) and Commander (10%). When you select a mode and run a game, the actual GPU and memory frequency are not displayed here in this menu or in Coolbits. The only way to tell if D.O.T is working is to test your gaming performance or fill rate tests. According to fill rate tests, we found that the Commander mode was overclocking the GPU at least 20MHz over stock speed.
The overclocking sliders in the MSI Clock menu let you go up to 700MHz for GPU and 1300MHz for the memory. Coolbits allows you to go much farther, however, as it is capable of setting the core as high as 860MHz and the memory to 1440MHz. Although you probably cannot overclock to those levels, Coolbits allows for more overclocking headroom than MSI’s D.O.T.