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.

Specifications

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.

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.

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.

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.