Date:
Thursday , August 10, 2006
Author:
Casey Brewer
Editor:
Brent Justice
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MSI NX7300 GS TD256E

Gaming for under $100 is possible with the latest video cards sporting DX9 features. We evaluate the MSI NX7300 GS TD256E and see how this value-end video card compares to the competition in the latest games.

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System Test Setup

For our system we are using the nForce4-based ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard and an AMD Athlon 64 3500 + running at 2.2GHz with 1GB of Corsair RAM.

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Video Cards:

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All video cards were tested at their default frequencies as you can see above. We used the latest drivers at the time of evaluation. The memory size for the MSI NX7300 GS is listed as 512 MB. This is the combined framebuffer size with TurboCache on our 1 GB system memory test system. 256 MB is dedicated on the video card and 256 MB is shared with system memory.

Game and Video Card Evaluation Setup

For comparison, we are using a Sapphire Radeon X1300 PRO with 256MB of RAM. Currently this card is priced at $99 and a $20 mail-in rebate is offered which would bring it down to $79.00, therefore these video cards are price comparable.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The highest playable section shows the best image quality delivered at a playable frame rate.

In our graphs, we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA or AF being used.

AD AA = Adaptive AA – Indicates the use of ATI’s Adaptive AA on X1000 series video cards.

HQ AF = High Quality Anisotropic Filtering – Indicates the use of ATI’s High Quality option for Anisotropic Filtering that is not angle dependent.

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video card