14 DAY TRIAL // If you are an NVIDIA fan and you are wondering which graphics card manufacturer has the best GTX280-based solution, you should know you can choose from quite a few alternatives. One of them includes MSI's most recent offer, and uses NVIDIA's flagship graphics processor in a factory-oveclocked GeForce graphics card. Interestingly enough, the company managed to keep the stock cooling solution.
The new N280GTX-T2D1G Super OC is based on the reference card that the Santa Clara-based green company released in mid-June 2008. It is equipped with the same dual-slot cooler featured on every standard GT200-series graphics cards, but it boasts a GPU speed of 700MHz, up from the 602MHz for the reference cards. The card's Shaders and memory clocks have also been raised to boost the performance of the world's highest performance graphics card (at this moment). The Shaders have been set at 1400MHz (1296MHz for the standard version), while the memory is set to work at 2300MHz, up from the 2234MHz on the reference cards.
Apart from the overclocked clock rates, it is basically a standard implementation of NVIDIA's high-end card. This means that it is equipped with 1GB of GDDR3 memory, 240 Stream processors, DirectX 10 and triple-SLI support, as well as a PCI-Express 2.0 interface for better performance. Ultimately, MSI's 700MHz GTX280 promises an impressive amount of graphics performance, packed in the same dual-slot package as all other reference cards. It would be nice to see whether AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 4870X2 has the power to overshadow this factory overclocked GTX280.
Unfortunately, MSI failed to update its website, so we can't say if the card is going to be part of a special game bundle or not. Still, upon a quick search on the web, we found that it is available at various European retailers and that it comes with a price tag set somewhere in the ?400 range.