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MSI 7300GS PCI Express MSI GeForce NX7300GS-TD256E: MSI's latest budget offers a number of modern features such as Shader Model 3.0 without the big price tag.
Date: April 14, 2006
Manufacturer:
Written By:
Price:

Enthusiasts are normally concerned with crazy framerates and high resolutions. The hardware required though is hardly cheap, and the fact of the matter is, high-end video cards are not the cash cows you might expect. The real money for most companies come from the mid-ranged to mainstream parts found in your under-$200 aisles and eMachine-ish PCs.

MSI GeForce 7300 GS PCI Express

Aimed strictly at the mainstream, the delivers an impressive feature set for well under $100. Compared to many of the usual products that are dropped off by the delivery guy, the MSI 7300 GS arrived in one of the smaller boxes we've received.

Inside the packaging, we found the parts to be in a bit of a mess with the video card itself spilling into the compartment next to it. Thankfully, the card was in good working order, but MSI should use a thicker cardboard or some foam inserts in the future. Other than the card, we received a fairly complete package (considering the ), which includes an instruction sheet, driver CD, case badge, D-Sub to DVI converter and a S-Video cable. At the time of testing, NVIDIA's web drivers did not support the MSI NX7300 GS and we had to rely on MSI's drivers for testing.

MSI also included a racing game called Juice. The game certainly looks pretty, but it won't be replacing Need For Speed as my game of choice. For utilities, there is a full version of Norton Internet Security 2005 which will be very useful for those of you who like to download stuff from mysterious sources.

The MSI GeForce 7300 GS is built upon the 90nm manufacturing process and features 4 pixel pipes and 3 vertex shaders. It is a half height PCI Express card, making it a possible candidate for slim desktop PCs. However, they did not include a custom half height rear bracket to make this possible.

MSI maxes the supported core speed by clocking the card at 550MHz. TurboCache is supported with this product which can bump up the total addressable memory via the PCI Express bus, but to cover your bases, MSI arms their 7300 GS with 256MB of 810MHz DDR2, slightly up from NVIDIA's spec.

The die shrink makes for a much cooler card, but MSI still designed a rather large copper cooler to handle the heat. The fan does not spin very load at all, but it is far from noiseless. Given that the heatsink was not anywhere near warm during testing, we think MSI could have gotten away with a large passive cooler.

The MSI 7300 GS offers both D-Sub and DVI outputs as well as S-Video. As with all of the GeForce 7 Series GPUs, the MSI 7300 GS features PureVideo which will provide very good image quality at the targeted price-point. Therefore, builders of HTPCs can look into this product since it will accelerate MPEG-2 in hardware, as well as Windows Media HD Video (WMV HD). The GPU offloads video decoding from the CPU and should provide smoother video playback and lower CPU usage. PureVideo offers advanced de-interlacing and enhanced 3:2 and 2:2 pulldown to cut down on blur and ghosting.

Gaming Performance

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2
Processor: Genuine Intel(R) CPU 3.73GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 1024MB Corsair XMS2-8000UL RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Card name: MSI NX7300GS (NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS)
Driver Version: 6.14.0010.8265

The games to be used for benchmarking are as follows:

Doom 3 v1.3

Unreal Tournament 2004 v3355

Far Cry v1.33

Half-Life 2

3DMark06

Quake 3 Arena

We'll be pitting the MSI GeForce 7300 GS up against the ATI X1300, its direct competitor. Both of the cards are packing 256MB of ram, clocked at factory defaults. We selected two resolutions; 800x600 which we consider the absolute lowest for game play, and 1280x1024 which is our preferred "average" setting. Naturally, these resolutions were considered given the horsepower of these cards.

All testing will be done with default driver installations, set to quality, with AntiAliasing and Anisotropic filtering turned off in the driver's control panel. Bench'emAll!'s default timedemos will be used to collect our scores. 3DMark06 was run with all the tests supported by hardware turned on, default options, 3 times and averaged out. Note that one test is unsupported by ATI hardware, so we disabled the same test for NVIDIA as well.

Since our system was equipped with 1GB of ram, TurboCache was automatically enabled by the drivers. While it was great our card became 512MB effectively, we were unable to knock the memory down to default without reducing our system ram to 512MB.

Doom 3

Both cards are pretty close here but the MSI NX7300 GS has a small lead over the ATI X1300, though at lower resolution, the gap is quite larger.

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