NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 200 series of graphics cards, that launched about 60 days prior to the publishing of this article, have undergone a significant price reduction since they first debuted. At the time, NVIDIA flexed its GPU muscle with a high-end, single GPU graphics design that their primary competition could only compete with by throwing two GPU's at the problem. As such, NVIDIA initially priced their flagship GeForce GTX 280 at a significant premium, meaning $649 upon its introduction on launch day. Would you believe us, if we told you back then, that these cards would be selling for $200 dollars less in only about two months time? You can believe it today. - HotHardware

MSI GeForce GTX 280 1GB OverClocked Card Review

MSI's bundle is fairly standard issue with respect to the current lineup of flagship cards from NVIDIA. There is no included game bundle with the GeForce GTX 280 series but the card does come with a driver CD that offers a bunch of MSI built utilities, like live update, which will actually upgrade your graphics card BIOS, if an update is released by MSI. MSI also includes the standard GeForce GTX 280 bundle of cables and converters that we've seen in other bundles. MSI's warranty is a little on the light side for our preference, offering only one year of coverage while many competitive offerings come with 3 year or even lifetime warranties.

To look closely at the MSI GeForce GTX 280 is to look at any standard NVIDIA reference design layout of the GeForce GTX 280 board. There are no other distinguishing features of this card versus other off the shelf designs, save for its custom MSI decal with what appears to be a rather angry cyber Ogre of some sort emblazoned on it. It also employs a two slot cooler design but will plug into any standard PCI Express slot, preferably one that is PCI Express 2.0 enabled. In terms of the GPU cooler itself, NVIDIA's reference design squirrel cage fansink assembly does a nice job of managing heat while not proving offensive to the ear.

In terms of power requirements, as with all GeForce GTX 280 cards, you'll need both 6-pin and 8-pin PCI Express power cables to run this card, in addition to a robust power supply capable of pushing at least 235W for graphics alone. Finally, the MSI GeForce GTX 280 OC version is also overclocked to a 650MHz core clock, as shipped from the factory, which is about 48MHz over NVIDIA's reference design. This should offer a bit more performance in GPU intensive situations but will also increase power consumption just a hair as well. The card's 1GB of frame buffer memory, however is clocked at 2300MHz effective.

Summarizing the performance of MSI's GeForce GTX 280 OC graphics board is relatively painless as there aren't any grand revelations to explain. In all of the tests we put the MSI card through, we observed highly competitive performance compared to other GeForce GTX 280 cards. Though the GeForce GTX 280 OC version is clocked slightly slower than our competing reference GeForce GTX 280 cards, the performance delta was completely negligible and not significant enough to exhibit any perceivable real world performance variance. We'd also add that users could easily overclock the card to identical specifications of others.

Since the MSI GeForce GTX 280 OC video card doesn't offer any real stand-out specifications or features, in the final analysis, price plays an important role in our overall perspective of the product. Fortunately, this is a strong suit currently for GeForce GTX 280 cards in the market, where heavy price cuts have already been levied that offer the consumer a much better value in the product compared to its cost structure back on launch day.