MSI NX8800GTS-T2D320E-HD OC

Like ASUS, MSI is perhaps best known for their motherboards, but we’ve been huge fans of MSI’s graphics cards for quite some time now. MSI was one of the first card manufacturers to get on the near silent graphics bandwagon. Back in the GeForce 4 days, their T.O.P. Tech coolers were the quietest around. Then, starting with their Nbox GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card, MSI shifted their focus to the game bundle. The card shipped with over $120 worth of cutting-edge games at that time (including the hit shooter Battlefield 1942), as well as a USB mouse. On top of that, the board shipped with better cooling, including twin fans! The card really was in a class of its own.



Since then, MSI has continued to provide cutting edge game bundles with their graphics cards, and their NX8800GTS-T2D320E-HD OC is no exception, as the card ships with a copy of Company of Heroes on DVD-ROM. In fact, it’s a special edition 2 disc DVD-ROM set that includes multiple language support. The MSI exclusive edition of Company of Heroes can be played in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish. The disc also includes manuals for each of the aforementioned languages as well as traditional Chinese, Korean, and Polish. Finally, the 2-disc set includes a demo for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Dark Crusade.


Company of Heroes was one of the best games of 2006, winning multiple Editor’s Choice and Game of the Year awards. The game is an RTS set during World War II, but it doesn’t play like a traditional RTS, it truly is unique. The game also sports very nice graphics, and as we mentioned at the outset, will soon be patched to support DX10, making it the perfect game to show off the NX8800GTS-T2D320E-HD OC’s capabilities.

In addition to the game bundle, other software that ships with the card includes MSI’s Vivid video technology, which acts a lot like ASUS Splendid providing tools for such things as sharpening and adjusting color in photos while MSI’s Dual CoreCell software can be used for hardware monitoring and overclocking.


Speaking of overclocking, like many of the board manufacturers included in this roundup, MSI’s NX8800GTS-T2D320E-HD OC is overclocked from the factory, running at 575MHz on the graphics core, 1.35GHz for the stream processors, and 1.7GHz for the memory.


In addition to the aforementioned game/software bundle, MSI also includes two DVI adapters, a component video cable, S-Video cable, and power adapter. When unboxing MSI’s NX8800GTS-T2D320E-HD OC we also noticed one additional feature we hadn’t seen on any of the other cards – MSI includes plastic covers for the DVI connections. Nice touch MSI!!