Date:
Monday , September 14, 2009
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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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.

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Test System Setup

For our test system platform we are using an ASUS Blitz Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 processor at 3.66GHz, and 4GB of OCZ Platinum series DDR3-1600. For the power supply, we will be using a CoolerMaster Real Power Pro 1250W .

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 both the NVIDIA and AMD video cards we will be using the latest drivers. For the MSI N275GTX Lightning and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275, we will be using the ForceWare 190.62 WHQL driver. For the AMD Radeon HD 4890, we will be using the Catalyst 9.8 WHQL driver.

Below is the GPU-Z screenshot of the MSI N275GTX Lightning after we installed the drivers.

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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.