Date:
Thursday , April 09, 2009
Author:
Matthew Krysiak
Editor:
Brent Justice
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MSI N285GTX SuperPipe OC

Brand new from MSI we have their N285GTX SuperPipe OC, based on the GeForce GTX 285, to evaluate. With its magnificent cooling solution and higher than standard clock speeds we see how it stacks up against a GTX 285 and a GTX 280 in gameplay performance, overclocking, power and temperature testing.

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System Test Setup

For our test system platform we are using an ASUS Blitz Formula motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor at 3.66GHz, and 4GB of OCZ Technology DDR2 PC2-8000 Platinum. For the power supply, we will be using a Corsair TX750W.

While it might be a bit "overkill," we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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Driver Setup

With the NVIDIA video cards we will be using the latest Beta drivers at the time of evaluation which is ForceWare 185.66.

Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home . Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.