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- Date:
- Monday , September 14, 2009
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
MSI N275GTX Lightning
MSI has brought a sleek and sexy video card to the market with the N275GTX Lightning. But with its high MSRP and its late release into this generation of video cards, what kind of value can it actually give us moving forward? We'll compare it with a stock NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 and AMD Radeon HD 4890 to find out what this technical masterpiece has to offer.
Introduction
Microstar International (MSI) is a Taiwan-based computer hardware manufacturer founded in 1986. Primarily a designer and manufacturer of PC motherboards, MSI has expanded their business into barebones PCs, servers and workstations, communications devices, consumer electronics, Notebooks, Netbooks, graphics cards, and other various electronic products. Their company motto "Quality Products Create Faithful Customer" belies their underlying corporate strategy of designing and manufacturing quality devices for various markets and letting their high-quality reputation earn them the trust and respect of electronics consumers worldwide. In fact, their Intel P55 chipset based P55-GD80 motherboard recently won an Editor's Choice Gold award here at HardOCP.
Today, we are going to be examining one of their new line of "Lightning" video cards, featuring elevated clock speeds and custom cooling devices. The video card in question today is the MSI N275GTX Lightning, featuring an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 GPU and 1792MB of GDDR3 memory.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 GPU
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 launched on April 1st of 2009, parallel to launch of the AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4890. The GTX 275 features one GPU, and that processor is very closely related to the silicon that powers the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295. The GeForce GTX 275 GPU features 240 streaming processors, the same count as the more expensive GeForce GTX 285. The standard design features a 448-bit memory bus equipped with 896MB of GDDR3 memory chips, which is the same as what we find on the less-expensive GeForce GTX 260 video card.
NVIDIA's reference specification calls for the clock rate of graphics core (including the render backend, featuring 80 texture units) to be configured at 633MHz, while the shader core (the streaming processors) is to be clocked at 1.404GHz. This gives the GTX 275 a texture fill rate of 50.6 billion texels per second. Meanwhile, the standard memory specification calls for a memory clock of 2.268GHz DDR (or 1.134GHz actual clock speed), giving the video card a peak theoretical memory bandwidth of 127GB per second.
The GPU launched as a natural competitor to the Radeon HD 4890, and it has succeeded in that role. In game after game, the two GPUs trade blows, with neither video card able to claim victory on performance alone. As expected with ~$200 USD video cards, the true victor is decided by street price, not absolute performance.
MSI N275GTX Lightning
The MSI N275GTX Lightning is part of MSI's new Lightning branded series of video cards which feature an after-market video card cooling device and above-specification clock rates. In addition, for the N275 GTX Lightning at least, there is twice the amount of memory installed. Currently, the Lightning series of MSI video cards consists of a GeForce GTX 260, GTX 260 "Black", and this new GTX 275.
The graphics core of the N275GTX Lightning is clocked at 700MHz, which is 67MHz above NVIDIA's specification. The memory is clocked at 2.3GHz, which is only 32MHz beyond the reference. The shader core's clock rate is unchanged from the original design, and comes in at 1.404GHz. The non-standard cooling device features two large and quiet fans, and must truly be seen to be appreciated.
The packaging arrived somewhat abused, but with the contents secure and well-protected. The front of the outer cardboard carton features a front-view image of a Lockheed-Martin F35 Lightning II fighter jet, which could be what inspired the Lightning name for this series of video cards. The front of the box shows very little information regarding the contents of the package, other than the fact that the video card has 1792MB of memory and is apparently a "Military Class" product. That specification refers to the quality of some of the components on the PCB, namely the voltage regulation circuitry.
The back of the box goes into greater detail about the components on the PCB, as well as the features of the cooling device. The chokes used in the voltage regulation circuitry are listed as Solid State Chokes with a pure iron core. This feature is supposed to eliminate the buzzing sound that can result from copper coil based chokes when placed under load. Also listed is a "Hi-c CAP", or "highly conductive capacitor" with a rare tantalum core, boasting 15x less leakage than standard capacitors, which should reduce wasted power consumption. There are also solid state capacitors with an aluminum core, which allegedly offer lower operating temperatures and higher efficiency.
This video card features and Active Phase Switching (APS) power module that actively switches parts of the video card on and off depending on the load. There are 3 LEDs on the video card (red, blue, and green) which indicate what level of power, from 3-phase to 10-phase is being supplied to the video card. During operation, these lights do go on and off, apparently indicating that the APS is indeed active.
Lastly, there are 4 small jumpers that are actually meant to be used with a multi-meter so that overclockers can check the voltage of the video card’s memory and GPU.
For more information on all of these features present, please check out MSI’s announcement.
Bundled with the MSI N275GTX Lightning, we found a 6-foot HDMI cable, a DVI to VGA adaptor, a DVI to HDMI adaptor, a dual-Molex to single 6-pin auxiliary power adaptor, and an S/PDIF cable used to connect the computer’s digital audio output device to the video card for full HDMI capabilities.
Also inside the box, we found a driver CD-ROM disc and an MSI Lightning Afterburner disc containing the overclocking utility that MSI designed for this video card. There is also a detailed user’s manual (bottom right) and there are two quick start guides (bottom and top left).
The Hardware
This video card doesn’t look like any GeForce GTX 275 we’ve seen to date. It has a large aftermarket cooling device featuring two 80mm fans and five big heat-pipes bonded to a heavy base plate with a large amount of very thin heat-sink fins. The aluminum shroud does not completely contain the heat-sink, and is anodized with a stylish titanium color. The shroud is completely open on the bottom and back end of the video card, and folds slightly over the top edge.
The MSI N275GTX Lightning is the same size as all other GTX 200 series video cards we have seen. It is 10.5" long, 4.25" tall, and 1.5" thick, making it a dual-slot video card.
For ports, the MSI N275GTX Lightning is a little different. There is a single DVI connector, a single VGA connector, and a single HDMI connector. Missing is the hitherto standard component video 720p HDTV DIN connector and the second DVI port. Gamers with two DVI-only monitors will want to think twice about this video card.
The backside of the video card is very normal, featuring rather a lot of very small surface-mount electronic components, a clutch of stickers, and 18 small steel screws that keep the heat-sink firmly affixed to the front of the video card.
Shown here are the three colored LEDs that indicate the video card's power status. In the photo on the left, the test system is sitting at the Windows 7 desktop and only the green LED is lit, meaning that the three-phase power circuit is active. In the photo on the right, the test system is running Furmark, and all three LEDs are lit. That means that the ten-phase circuit is running.
Under the Cover
Of course we know that everyone wants to know what this thing looks like under the hood, so after we completed testing, we took it all apart to see how it all goes together.
After removing the ten large spring-loaded screws from the back of the video card, the bulk of the cooling device including the fans, heat-sink, heat-pipes, and base plate comes off with a squelchy twist thanks to the liberal amount of thermal paste applied to the top of the GPU. Interestingly, the ONLY part of the video card that the heat-sink actually touches is directly on top of the GPU. The GPU on our video card is labeled "G200-105-B3."
Under the large heat-sink assembly, there is a smaller aluminum plate that covers the memory and some power circuitry. Removing the remaining eight screws releases this plate, which is also attached to the memory and power chips by a greenish thermal tape.
The first photograph above primarily features the solid-state chokes advertised on the back of the box and described above. There are eight of these devices installed on this video card. Just on the other side of the SSC devices is a line of eight of the tantalum capacitors also described above.
In the middle photograph above, you can see the four pins for checking voltages. The two lower pins labeled "Vmem" are for checking voltage of the video memory, and the two upper pins are for checking the voltage of the GPU itself.
The last photograph details the memory devices used on this video card. The thermal tape left an oily residue on the chips which made photographing the things directly nearly impossible. However, we were able to discover that the memory chips in question are Hynix H58STH23MFP, which we cannot seem to locate on the Hynix website.
The Competition
The MSI N275GTX Lightning comes with an MSRP of $289.99 USD. Currently, the only online retailer to list this video card is ZipZoomFly, but it is listed as out of stock. Of course, the natural competitors to this video card are going to be the regular GeForce GTX 275 and the Radeon HD 4890. Its price-tag puts it squarely against the GeForce GTX 285, but we found that it was not competitive at that level out of the box. So, for this evaluation, we will compare the MSI N275GTX Lightning with a reference design NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 and an AMD Radeon HD 4890.