Date:
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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MSI NX8800 GTS 320 MB OC Edition Video Card

We take the highly overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB video card from MSI and run it through our Vista gaming tests including Lost Planet DX10 performance. The 640 MB 8800 GTS and 2900 XT are the cards to beat. Which is the best value under $400?

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Test Setup

For our system platform setup we are using the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor at 2.93 GHz and 2 GB of OCZ DDR2-800 RAM. We are evaluating the MSI NX8800 GTS 320 MB OC Edition video card against the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB video card and the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512 MB video card.

Article Image

All three video cards were tested at their default frequencies, as you can see above. We also used the latest drivers officially available at the time of evaluation.

Game and Video Card Evaluation Setup

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. We use a high performance system, with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

Wherever possible, we try to force anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic texture filtering (AF) from the video cards' respective control panels. Our experience has shown that using control panel options, as opposed to in-game options, usually results in better image quality and less "texture crawling". Therefore, in this article, wherever you see us use AF or AA in the table, and the in-game configuration screenshot does not reflect those AA or AF settings, we are forcing that feature from the control panel.

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

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 and 8 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 and 8 series video cards.

ADAA = Adaptive Antialiasing - Indicates the use of ATI's Adaptive Antialiasing technology setting on Radeon X1000 and HD 2000 series of video cards.