MSI N260GTX Lightning Review

Performance Analysis

The GTX 260 is an attractive prospect for gamers on a budget but only after months of serious price drops. Price drops or not, it's just not the best card in the price bracket as its direct ATI rivals have also been dropping their prices faster than diarrhoea-sufferer's trousers.

As a result, the Lightning, with its GTX 260 under the bonnet was at the bottom of most of our performance graphs. It's relatively modest overclock ensured that it beat a stock speed GTX 260 but cards such as ATI's Radeon HD 4890 1GB were too much for the Lightning to in its out of the box state, despite the whopping amount of memory the card features.

When it came to overclocking, the Lightning with its redesigned power circuitry managed one of the biggest overclocks we've seen from a graphics card. If you're prepared to run your GPU at this velocity then you can enjoy performance that is akin to a more expensive GTX 275, but then if you're happy to overclock the pants off of your hardware then you could bag a GTX 275 for £20 less and do the same to that for even more performance.

Folding@home performance sees the Lightning hit around the 7,000ppd mark, which is pretty standard for an Nvidia GT200-based card. Your Folding scores will see little to no benefit from increased memory so if you're looking to maximise your ppd to price ratio the the Lightning isn't a great way to do it.

Value

As the industry hovers around the pre-DirectX 11 stage of evolution and manufacturers desperately try to flog the remainder of their DirectX 10 and 10.1 stock, price to performance value has never been so competitive. Manufacturers want to get rid of their stock so fast anyone would think they were contaminated with swine flu. As we mentioned at the beginning of the review, the reason than the GTX 260 is worth considering is that it's the cheapest of the cards in it's performance bracket but now that MSI has added an £80 or so premium to the purchase, things don't look so appetising.

Let's take into consideration the reasons why the Lightning costs so much more than a regular model. The AirForce Panel is one of them, but it's been made too complicated with all of its crazy features. How many people are going to want to adjust the contrast of their display using a front panel box with touch sensitive buttons which barely work? The same goes for overclocking. It's a pain in the behind to use. Next up is the cooler which has performance only fractionally better than the reference design and doesn't exhaust air directly out of your case. It's a little quieter, but that's about all you can say for it..

Finally you've got the box and the power circuitry that allows for the uberclocking. The box is super sexy but, much like a good girlfriend, it's going to stay under your bed and rarely be heard of despite its great looks. The overclockability of the card is a feature worth having but even at full tilt it's scarcely faster than a stock speed GTX 275 which can be had for £20 less and then overclocked. For these reasons, the Lightning does not represent great value for money.

Final Thoughts

Well, what can we say? The strangest thing about the Lightning is the fact that so many high-end features and technology have been added to such a mediocre card as the GTX 260. It's like spending a couple of grand on chrome rims for an Austin Allegro and then reselling it as a product for car enthusiasts. Ok maybe not that bad, but you get the point.

That said, MSI deserves a massive slice of cake for solving the GT200 GPU's squealing problems that Nvidia denied even existed at first. Adding more power phases has made it one heck of an overclocker too. Sadly though the cooler and overclocking tool are both average at best. Combine this with the fact that it's...well, a GTX 260 at the heart of the package and we just can't recommend anyone buy themselves an N260GTX Lightning.

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• 7/10

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• 6/10

Score Guide