The release of the new generation of AMD cards in the form of Radeon HD 4800 series and the GT200 for NVIDIA was rather interesting event, since the both companies were preparing new cores for their cards, cores promising ultra high performance and even better price to performance ratios. The competing models were released almost simultaneously, thus raising many eyebrows with the obvious question behind this act. How do they compare to each other? Since they are interesting to the end users even by themselves alone, they are also destined to determine how much would the price of the older, very successful models so far drop as well as the performance difference. - ModReactor

MSI GeForce GTX 280 Super OC Version Card Review

With the growing popularity of PC gaming through the years, inevitably gaming hardware popularity rose too and the overclock as pleasant and inexpensive way to get some more performance, some more frames in the favorite game set in. That however changed a tad, since having overclocked computer became a fad, so all major video card companies began supplying factory overclocked hardware by the bucketful. On the other hand NVIDIA and AMD as the main gaming video card manufacturers have strict demands as on to what frequencies and PCB's their chips are used. And somehow that is quite logical too.

The boxes of such expensive cards have few quite logical characteristics, they are big, variegated and shiny. Recently it became popular for the box to be able to be opened easily from the top, right in the store even. Now below this new hood you'll find a quite a lot of the cards details on display, as well as list of the extra stuff the manufacturer put in. And that is inevitably destined to cause you to just throw your pile of money on the counter, in order to be able to hug the cardboard wrapped happiness and all teary with joy run back to your lair where uninterrupted gaming will ensue for as long as it takes for you to get zombified.

First thing to notice is that this is totally PCB and cooler referent model, meaning it's manufactured to the exact NVIDIA design specifications and that the only difference it bears with an NVIDIA made one is in the sticker on top of the cooler. The blue plugs protect the DVI connectors and the SLI bridge connector is hidden and protected by elegant plug that interferes not with the aggressive design of the cooler. The cooler is designed in such way that air is channeled in one direction, out of the case. That allows very little hot air to remain inside and the fan of the GeForce GTX 280 manages to keep silent under heavy load.

When talking about overclock, and especially for the MSI GeForce GTX 280 Super OC edition, we must not forget that it bares the Super OC suffix for a reason. This happens to be one of the most highly factory overclocked cards on the market. Still for an hardware maniac that's never enough. So we decided to push the card to its limits. The frequencies reached were 720MHz for the core and 2500MHz effective for the memory. It's not that MSI GeForce GTX 280 Super OC version is no good. Thing is it's just not for everybody. On the other hand we speak of class in which all that matters is performance.

If you are one of those people, that's probably your card. This is unquestionably the fastest single core NVIDIA model on the market. The new core architecture provides bunch of options, options that in time will become steadily available to the common user. At the same time MSI had done their part and provided a card with rich bundle and long warranty. Still should money be decisive factor for you, keep away from this class of hardware, instead search for lower models like the Radeon HD 4870 for example, a card that has much better price to performance ratio. The choice is yours, depending on the money you can spend.