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 .

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.

Questions? Comments? Talk to us in the Forums.

HOME