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MSI NX8800 Ultra OC Edition

MSI's overclocked GeForce 8800 Ultra features the highest clock speeds and lowest price of any air-cooled GeForce 8800 Ultra on the market. Is that enough to counteract the high price of the Ultra GPU?

Introduction

Microstar International (MSI) was founded in 1986 as a computer motherboard manufacturer. Since then, their product lineup has expanded to include barebones PCs, video cards, rackmount servers, networking equipment, and notebooks, among others. Since 2001, MSI has been expanding their manufacturing and distributing base into mainland China. Between their video card and motherboard manufacturing facilities, their annual productivity is estimated at over 27 million parts. They are an equal-opportunity video card manufacturer, producing video cards with both ATI and NVIDIA GPUs, and motherboards for both AMD and Intel CPUs.

Today, we are taking a good look at one of their video cards: the MSI NX8800 Ultra T2D768E-HD OC, featuring a factory overclocked NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra GPU and 768 MB of GDDR3 memory.

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra

NVIDIA’s Ultra name has always been synonymous with flat out fast performance and the highest clock speeds. As such, that is exactly what the GeForce 8800 Ultra is: a faster GeForce 8800 GTX. The core architecture is exactly the same, 128 streaming processors and 768 MB of GDDR3 memory on a 384-bit bus. The architecture is the same, but NVIDIA made a few changes to the silicon. The GPU itself is actually a newer refined revision compared to the GeForce 8800 GTX GPU, though still built on 90nm process. NVIDIA has tweaked the design including timing tuning and other minor things to provide the potential for higher clock speeds, all the while keeping power usage reasonable.

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is designed to have the GPU clocked at 612 MHz, and a memory clocked at 2.16 GHz DDR, or 1.08 GHz actual. That is up from the GTX specification by 37 MHz on the GPU core, and 360 MHz on the memory.

Our initial evaluation of the GeForce 8800 Ultra showed it to be only marginally faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX. In fact, it only showed a benefit in Oblivion, and then it was only able to allow us to use higher AA and grass fade settings. In the end, with the massive price increase on the GeForce 8800 Ultra, compared to the GeForce 8800 GTX, we saw no compelling reason to purchase the newer, more expensive video card at the time.

Since then, prices have fallen quite a bit, and there are a few Ultras out there at reasonable prices now compared to the GeForce 8800 GTX. One such video card is the highly overclocked MSI NX8800 Ultra OC Edition.

MSI NX8800 Ultra OC Edition

The MSI NX8800 Ultra OC Edition is one of the highest clocked GeForce 8800 Ultras on the market. In fact, there is only one faster video card, and it is a self-contained, liquid-cooled video card which costs $200 more. Even that video card is only 24 MHz faster than the MSI that we are evaluating today. The MSI NX8800 Ultra OC Edition comes out of the box with the GPU clocked at 660 MHz, and the memory clocked at 2.3 GHz DDR (or 1.15 GHz actual). That is a 48 MHz overclock on the GPU, and 70 MHz on the memory. Interestingly, the Streaming Processors are not overclocked from the factory. They are at the NVIDIA reference clock speed of 1.5 GHz. But perhaps the best part is that it is also one of the least expensive GeForce 8800 Ultra video cards you can buy. We’ll have more on that later.

This video card comes in a box befitting the actual size of the video card. It's big. On the front of the box is a standard fantasy character, but rather than a muscle bound knight in shining armor, this particular hero is of the more feminine variety. The back of the box is, once again, standard fare covered with specifications and information in a variety of languages. On one side of the box is found a small black and white sticker indicating the card's basic features, as well as some of the contents of the bundle. Inside the flap on the front of the box, we again find our lady hero, but this time all decked out in battle regalia. It is somewhat scant battle regalia, but she looks dangerous anyway.

The video card itself is just as plain as the first GeForce 8800 Ultra we saw, meaning MSI has stuck to the basic reference design and heatsink. There is a large, black plastic shroud covering the entire video card, from front to back. The fan housing extends above the edge of the video card, which allows air to be drawn in, even in SLI configurations when the video cards are right next to each other. The plastic shroud is open at the back end of the video card, which also serves to allow air to enter the cooling device. The dual-PCI-expansion slot bracket is colored the same mirrored titanium black as every other dual-slot GeForce 8800 video cards we've seen. In an attempt to keep with their "MSI Yellow DVI" program, MSI has supplied yellow DVI port covers for both ports on this video card. Apparently, the ports themselves are not yellow this time, as we have seen on other MSI products.

The backside of this video card is essentially just like the backside of most (but not all) video cards: uninteresting. The back of the PCB features mostly biasing and power management circuitry, as well as the requisite dual-SLI connectors. The MSI NX8800 Ultra OC Edition requires two auxiliary power connectors to be plugged in to this video card for operation, and there is a rather loud siren to tell if you have failed to plug in both connectors. At the business end, we find two dual-link DVI-I connectors and an HDTV component video and S-Video output port with full HDCP support.

The model and serial number sticker is affixed to the back side of the video card, but not very well. It fell off multiple times during our testing. The bundle packaged with this product is decent. It contains all of the cables you may need: an HDTV connector dongle, a pair of dual-Molex to auxiliary power connector adaptors, an S-Video cable, and a pair of DVI to VGA adaptors. There are two Quick User's Guides for documentation, as well as a driver CD and the full version of the critically acclaimed strategy game Company of Heroes which, after downloading and installing a myriad of patches, supports DirectX 10, but not to any great noticeable extremes in gameplay.

Price and Comparison

The MSI NX8800 Ultra OC Edition is available from Newegg for $599.99 USD. As we're writing this, Newegg is offering a $20.00 USD mail-in rebate, potentially bringing the cost down to $579.99. That low cost brings this video card into direct competition with the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX. As such, we will be evaluating the MSI NX8800 Ultra OC Edition against a standard-clocked NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX, which can be purchased for $529.99 USD. We want to know if that extra $50.00 to $70.00 USD will buy you a better gaming experience.