Overclocking

We first tried using the Lightning Afterburner overclocking utility to tweak the MSI NGTX275 Lightning but while it worked and also provided voltage adjustment, it's unable to increase the memory speed beyond 1,200MHz. The voltage adjustment also failed to improve initial overclocking results on the core but we shed no tears and fired up EVGA's Precision overclocking tool instead.

There was a fair amount of give and take involved here with increases in the core dramatically reducing the overclock we could achieve with the memory and vice versa. We eventually settled for 755MHz on the core with the shaders boosted independently to 1,620MHz and the memory just topping 1,200MHz at 1,210MHz (2.42GHz effective). We suspect the impact of high-density memory also had some part to play in the limited memory overclocking as well.

This was enough for tangible increases in Crysis, most notably to the minimum frame rate which was boosted from a Bill Clinton jogging pace of 23fps to a much more playable although not quite Usain Bolt-like 28fps at 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA.

Final Thoughts

Our benchmarks showed that while MSI's claim that the MSI NGTX275 Lightning can outrun a stock GTX 285 isn't true in all cases, it gets very close indeed and in Fallout 3 at 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA and Call of Duty: World at War at 1,920 x 1,200 4xAA, 2,560 x 1,600 0xAA and 4xAA it actually topples the GTX 285. It's also consistently faster than the stock GTX 275 as well, proving its worth in all but a handful of cases.

Seeing as the MSI NGTX275 Lightning is built for overclocking, it would be a crime not to take advantage of its offerings although we'd probably steer clear of the Lightning Afterburner ultility. As such, you would probably be looking at GTX 285 beating performance all round after a few hours of tweaking. £210 is around £50 more than a stock GTX 275 but still at least £20 less than the cheapest GTX 285 we could find. However we've found GTX 275s to be fairly quiet, but not silent like Sapphires aftermarket coolers: the MSI does feel the need to include a second fan into its cooling equation.



That said, the MSI NGTX275 Lightning did manage to knocka considerable 16°C off the load delta T compared to the stock GTX 275, which is certainly nothing to be sniffed at, although the Inno3D iChill GeForce GTX 275 managed a huge 31°C and retails for the same price. Clearly MSI made the best compromise when we are reminded that the Arctic Cooling heatsink on the Inno requires three slots and three fans, and even then doens't cool the memory!

The places where these things are really needed are on the GTX 280s and 285s of this world and we saw what a difference a good cooler can make to a very hot running graphics card with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Vapor-X 2GB. Folding performance is as expected for a decent Nvidia graphics card and the resulting PPD of 8394 whilst churning through P5787 worth 787 points is likely to see major gains in your position in our league tables.

The MSI NGTX275 Lightning does offer more though. We're talking here of course about all that advanced gadgetry and voltage measuring points, but as with the N260GTX Lightning, a tiny fraction of sales will go to people who will actually use this. Wasted effort? Maybe. It's certainly a graphics card that would be at home at an extreme overclocking event.

If anything the redesign is worth considering because it stops the annoying PSU squeel. In your average PC though, a stock GTX 275 will save you £50 and a GTX 285 is just £20 more and while it would be louder, would outperform the MSI NGTX275 Lightning on most counts, and likely all if you overclocked it.

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Score Guide