MSI N240GT MD512/D5
Built with miltary grade components for overclocking and power effeciency, this lower end card based on NVIDIA’s new 240GT card gets some in house Viperlair testing.
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There has been a preponderence of graphics card reviews over the past few months, and the majority have all been AMD/ATI based GPU’s. So it’s nice to have another NVIDIA based card in house for some testing for a change. This particular card is aimed at the performance budget sector, although it’s closer to the ‘mid range’ in performance and more than close for price. The GT 240 is a DX10.1 part (NVIDIA currently has no DX11 cars for sale as yet) and is a 40nm core based on the GT 215. So far, things are pretty normal on paper, but the card we have here is , which sports military grade components and has software controllable voltage for the core; with the GT 240 already being touted as pretty overclockable, this looks like a recipe for some easy high end overclocking fun. |
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Specifications
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Model Name
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MSI N240GT MD512/D5 OC Edition |
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Chipset
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GeForce GT 240 |
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Memory Size
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512MB |
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Manu. Process
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40nm |
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Memory Type
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GDDR5 |
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RAMDAC
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400MHz |
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Engine CLK
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550MHz |
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Memory CLK
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3400MHz |
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Memory Interface
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128bit |
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Bus Interface
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PCI Express x16 2.0 |
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GPU Features
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‧2nd Generation NVIDIA Unified Architecture ‧NVIDIA PhysX Ready ‧Microsoft DirectX 10.1 Support ‧NVIDIA CUDA Technology ‧PCI Express 2.0 Support ‧GigaThread Technolog ‧OpenGL 3.1 Optimization and Support ‧16x Anti-aliasing Technology ‧128-bit floating point High Dynamic-Range (HDR) Lighting ‧Dynamic Contrast Enhancement & Color Stretch ‧NVIDIA Lumenex™ Engine ‧Dual-link DVI Support ‧NVIDIA PureVideo HD Technology ‧Discrete, Programmable Video Processor ‧Dual-stream Hardware Acceleration ‧HDCP Capable |
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Ports
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1x VGA, 1x DVI, 1x (Native) HDMI |
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The box for the N240GT MD512/D5 OC Edition sports an image of a Jet fighter and lots of pertinent information. Of note is the indications that this is an OC edition card and that the card also has HDMI. The rear of the card has more information. Inside is a recycled cardboard molded insert, the card, a couple of pamphlets and the software CD.
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The card itself is actually pretty good looking. A nice dark appearence with aluminum and gold accents. The cooler setup is an aluminum circular fin design with a black fan. The cooler is quite high and the card is a two slot setup, which for a lower end card is a little out of the ordinary, but MSI do market this for overclocking so the cooling is important.
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As mentioned before, MSI make big on the miltary grade components used on this card such as the gold SSC (Solid State Chokes) for higher voltage control and no buzzing noises.
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The back of the card is pretty uneventful but does show off the nice black PCB. The IO Panel sports an MSI labeled cooling vent for the top half and three outputs below. The first is a blue colored DVI-I connection, the second is a standard VGA connection and the third is an HDMI port. The more observant among you will have already noticed that there isn’t the usual audio connection for the card to pass through audio. Instead, this card passes the audio from your existing sound card via the PCIe bus, so no need for a secondary physical connection to the S/P-DIF port on your motherboard. The card is fully HDMI 1.3a compliant, so things are a looking good for this card as an HTPC workhorse too.
Testing
Testing the MSI N240GT MD512/D5 OC Edition consists of putting it through it’s paces in a few games and also seeing how far we can overclock it. For comparison, I’m using a 4670 512MB card.
Test Setup: Intel Core 2 Duo 6420 @ 3.00GHz, 4GB of OCZ PC2-6400 Ram @ 900MHz, Asus Blitz Formula, Maxtor Diamondmax 10 7200 250GB HDD, Asetek Waterchill Watercooling, Hyper Type M 730w PSU. All latest drivers as of November 2009 and the OS is Windows 7 RC1.
Software
Left 4 Dead 2 – Recording a custom demo on the Dead Center – Hotel level (inside in the inferno), we used FRAPS to record frame rates as we played back the demo on all cards at same settings.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars – ETQW gives us our lone OpenGL test results as we run through a recorded demo on the Slipgate level. Settings for all cards were the same.
Racedriver: GRID – Grid has some very good looking visuals. We used FRAPS as we took a Skyline for a test drive around the Ring. Settings for each card were set to highest possible for that card.
Assassin’s Creed – We headed for the nearest tower from the bureau roof in Acre and repeatedly climbed to the top. With 2 leaps of faith and a good look of the city from on high, we once again used FRAPS to record our framerates. Settings for each card were set to highest possible for that card.
Crysis Warhead – We used the Framebuffer benchmark tool to run through the Ambush demo and recorded the results with FRAPS. Settings for each card were set to highest possible for that card.
Devil May Cry 4 (Benchmark) – DMC4′s benchmark provides a nice way of testing that anyone can do. Results are all from the benchmark itself, and include average frame rates as well as 4 graphs for each level tested. Settings for all cards were the same.
Left 4 Dead 2 (DirectX 9)
We expect the GT 240 card to better the 4670 in most games, and that’s pretty much the result here. Settings for both cards were the same; All settings to High except Detail Effects which were set to Medium, 4xMSAA, 8xAF at 1680×1050. The level used for testing is pretty heavy on GPU’s with all the fire and smoke, but without a doubt the MSI N240GT does well enough to play all levels of the game at these settings. It helps that you don’t need to move at a fast pace but generally speaking the experience is a good one with this game.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (OpenGL)
Both cards were set for High settings at 1680×1050, no soft particles, 4xMSAA and 8xAF. The MSI N240GT is a clear winner here, with consistently higher frame rates. The 4670 certainly needs to drop the settings before the game would become truely playable online, as those dips in the graph will put you at a disadvantage. The MSI N240GT certainly takes this one.
Assassin’s Creed (DirectX 10)
Using the ingame menus, both cards were tested at 1680×1050, AntiAliasing (MSAA) 2/3, Shadows 2/3 and Details 3/4. The game looked a little sharper on the GT 240 card compared to the 4670, but both images were excellent; it will be down to personal preference as to which you would prefer. Again, the MSI N240GT is the better peforming card, but it is pretty close, and ingame, even with the slightly sharper image, you’d have great difficulty in naming each card in a blind taste test.
Crysis Warhead (DirectX 10)
We used Gamer settings across the board, with No MSAA or AF, at 1680×1050 for both cards, and it’s plain that the 4670 needs to come down to Mainstream. Infact, dropping the 4670 to Mainstream gives it similar framerates to that of the N240GT at Gamer settings. Honestly, after the other tests, I thought I’d messed up the testing, and did it 3 extra times to be sure, but the GT240 is really pretty good with the Crysis engine. Putting it into perspective, these are still not great numbers, but Crysis does have some of the best use of motion blur in a game, and it is pretty playable on the GT240. And of course you have plenty of settings you could drop lower should you need to for certain heavy duty parts of the game.
Racedriver: GRID (DirectX 9)
Grid ran pretty well on both cards, although the experience was much better on the N240GT. The game isn’t that bad when you play at frame rates lower than 60, but there is a noticeable difference. You certainly don’t want frame rates dipping below 30. The N240GT almost gives a 50FPS Avg at these settings (1680×1050, 4xMSAA, High settings across the board) and with a little tweaking could easily reach the 60FPS, but I felt that the trade off in eye candy was worth the slight drop.
Devil May Cry 4 – Benchmark (DirectX 10)
MSI N240GT MD512/D5
MSI 4670
The benchmark gave the N240GT a solid A grade, although this was with High settings and 0xMSAA. Super High settings and any MSAA meant that frame rates dropped closer to the 30 Avg, and for DMC4 you really do need to aim for the 60′s.
Overclocking
This section of the review is going to be a little longer than usual because we have a little something extra to look at with this card; MSI’s software. Created by the Rivatuner author for MSI, this is a skinnable application that can aid you in overclocking your graphics card. Whilst this software was commisioned by MSI to be created for MSI, MSI have made it freely downloadable for all, so why don’t you take a look for yourselves .
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will happily allow you to alter the Voltage of the Core, the Clock Shader and Memory speeds, and then save those settings as a profile. Much like Rivatuner, you can use hotkeys to activate these profiles and up to 5 seperate profiles can be saved. Monitoring via a graph format is available and there are a good few advanced options in the settings. You can even have an OSD (On Screen Display) to monitor things when you can’t see your desktop, such as in game; in combination with the hotkeys, you could catch a potential crash due to excessive overclocking before hand and correct the issue with just a couple of button presses. All in all, I really like the Afterburner software, and I’ll likely be using it for a while, even on machines without MSI cards.
However, I did have a little trouble initially overclocking the card. Don’t get me wrong, it overclocks wonderfully, I just couldn’t do it. The problem arose because the Voltage indicator simply goes from 0 to +80 (you can also lower the voltage from 0 to -80). But what is +80? +80 volts? .80? 0.08? Who knows? Not wanting to fry the card I carefully moved the slider just a few nothces and hit apply … only to have it reset to 0. Eventually I worked out that the slider had to be moved in units of 10′s. After this, overclocking was a breeze.
My initial overclock was done without voltage adjustment, but again using the Afterburner software. The MSI N240GT-MD512-D5 OC Edition already comes slightly overclocked on it’s GDDR5 memory, with speed of 1800MHz compared to the NVIDIA specified 1700MHz. We easily reached a nice 1900MHz, although anything over this for long periods caused the a few weird errors with textures in a few games. Still, 1900MHz is a nice bump. We wasn’t so lucky with the core. I tried 3 different drivers, and 3 clean systems (just to be sure) but I couldn’t get any higher than 562 on the core. Originally the core was 550MHz, so 562 is pretty poor, and rather dissapointing since I’d heard these 240 GT cards overclocked quite well. Still, that’s the way it goes with overclocking. Of course that wasn’t the end of it since we still had the ability to alter the voltage and boost our overclocking potential.
After the initial confusion of adjusting voltages in the Afterburner software, we started slow, but that was boring after the first three bumps and frankly I’d had enough of the ‘Display Driver recovering’ forcing me to reboot to get any proper 3D Acceleration out of it (again, on 3 different drivers too) so I took the voltage to the maximum and hit apply. Nope, not fried electronic smells, the card was perfectly happy to run this way, and did so for days without issue. Our overclock potential also jumped from a lowly 562MHz to a more respectable 620MHz. Still not the greatest overclock, but as always with overclocking, YMMV. Around the web, many folks are getting higher so I guess I was just a little unlucky this time around.
As you can see from the graph above, the overclocking didn’t have much effect on our frame rates which is a bit of a shame, but a free boost is welcomed none the less.
Final Words
The is very much a Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none card. We have a good looking, cool running card, designed for overclocking complete with software voltage adjustments. For the area of the market it’s aimed at it does pretty well in games, and the connectivity is very good with HDMI as well as DVI and VGA. There is even some excellent, that you can use with this card, or any others for that matter, for overclocking.
So it checks all the right boxes and is a brilliant card … except it’s not. This is an NVIDIA 240 GT GPU, and regardless of the NVIDIA marketing speak that this is a performance part, it’s not. Compared with everything thats available right now, it’s closer to a budget card, a card for users with lower resolution monitors who want more than an onboard solution can provide. It would make for a good HTPC card. We have HDMI out, it does all the requisite HD acceleration and it does it very quietly. Which means you don’t need all the fancy overclocking software or high end chokes and voltage adjustments. You just need it to sit in your machine quietly displaying your video media.
But since it is a lower end part, it’s not that big a hit on your wallet if something goes wrong while taking advantage of the cool and clever overclocking stuff, especially since you are able to so easily mess about with the voltages with the brillant Afterburner software. However the end result of the overclocking is that, while it does overclock pretty well, and MSI have done an excellent job with the card, the results are pretty lack lustre. And that’s because it’s a GT 240 GPU. A more mid range card, or a high end card would benefit greatly, so I’m really looking forward to seeing this overclocking software and hardware combination from MSI on cards in the near future, because this little glimpse has been great fun. The Afterburner software means that anyone can do it like the big boys but it’s simply not needed or overly useful for todays games on this lower end type of GPU. Our results from overclocking were lower than most get from these cards, but even with the highest overclocks, we are still talking about only a few extra frames in todays games, 3-5 extra on average so you have to ask is it worth it?
Add to this you have to factor in the price and the competition. The card is , and if you look to the other camp, you can get a 4770 card that will do the same job for less and give you better frame rates in all but Crysis. Our 4670 wasn’t that far behind (again, except for Crysis) if we are being honest. If you can stretch a little further, you could even get a 5750 for around the $140 mark, which would give you full bitstreaming audio and DX11, although obviously you would lose out on CUDA and Physx.
Speaking of Physx, you could undoubtedly use this card as a good dedicated Physx GPU, but you would of course be limited by NVIDIA’s latest drivers to another NVIDIA card in the system as the latest drivers disable Physx if an AMD ATI card is detected. That means (for right now at least) no DX11 and DX11 games are already here, although how important DX11 will become is currently debatable since no games currently overly benefit from DX11 (at time of writing). You would basically have to weigh up the price of this card against future proofing for DX11 games; is it cheap enough for you that you don’t mind replace it in a few months if you have to.
A lot of the negative points of this card would become a whole lot more trivial if the price was lower, but unfortunately this simply isn’t the case right now. It is a shame, as this card is by no means a bad card; it is in fact a brilliant little card, I really like it and I’ve had great fun with it and the software. But the higher price, the mostly superfluous overclocking, and the fact it seems to be targeted for the wrong market segment (casual gamers and HTPC users would be better as opposed to overclockers) mean that this card likely won’t get the sales it deserves.
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