Msi N280gtx Oc

[Bungral]

Well I've just gone home to my spangly new card.

I'd read somewhere that some models from MSI come with a couple of games, so just before ordering I called MSI and asked them. The bloke from their sales department said no definitely not with that card. I decided to buy it anyway as it was on super special at Aria for £325 which wasn't too bad really considering it's an OC edition. I'll be overclocking it myself anyway so that wasn't why I bought it.

Aaaaanyway, I've just opened it to find it comes with 2 free games (sorta). Full game of colin mcrae Dirt and a month long subscription to lord of the rings online. Makes me feel happier I chose it now.

Not very good sales on MSI's part however. Could have lost a sale there.

 

[Toxcity]

Not a bad result that.. MSI's customer service is reassuring.

 

[Bungral]

Yeah wasn't very good on their part.

Anyway back to the card itself. Installed the card last night but forgot to clean my old drivers first.. A little over eager I spose.

It was a massive struggle to get it in the 900 especially with an HR-05 sat on my SB. I basically had to pull it down and hope it was still making a decent contact with the IHS. This caused a problem though. The HR-05 was pretty much covering the fan intake on the cards cooler. The HR-05 does have a decent 80mm fan on it blowing straight through it so I figured it might be ok as the heatsink didn't even really get warm.

Anyway, tried to jump straight in and get a nice benchmark up (for MSI's competition as it goes) and I didn't notice any problems at first as a few SuperPi runs aren't gonna touch the card. Moving on the 3DMark03, It started fine and after a test or two I was getting massive slow downs. Couldn't make out why it was only pulling 30 FPS in certain parts of certain tests. Figured it could have been the drivers conflicting with my old ones so I uninstalled the 280 and then cleaned all drivers. When I re-installed I was still getting the problem. I didn't know how far off it was as I don't use 3DMark03 very often so I ran 06 and got 10k . Wasn't happy considering I could hit 15k with my 88GT.

I figured out why it kept slowing down though. Due to the card hitting it's 105 degree threshold and throttling down it's clocks momentarily to stop the card getting hotter. This obviously would result in the slow downs I experienced in the benchmarks and thus the low scores.

So overheating was my problem then which made me think about the HR-05 again. Going to sleep last night I was running through ways of how to test it. Anything to not not have to take my mobo out and pinch the back of the SB cooler pushpins to release it. That would have mean draining my waterloop which I couldn't be arsed with. Decided to dremmel the top of the split pin things and release it that way. Then trim them flush with the mobo very carefully afterwards.

Removed that after work today and replaced the 280, again a massive pain in the arse due to having watercooled RAM in a tiny case. Decided to leave the 80mm fan resting below it blowing into it. Turned the comp back on and it took all of 90 seconds for it to hit 105 degrees in 3Dmark 06 with the fan set to 100%.

My poor ol SB running all nekid! Getting a little toasty too. That is until this arrives. :yumyum::yumyum: Nicked their last one.

Oh yeah the card squeals a bit when under load... That can get pretty annoying.

RMA RMA RMA!!! I think I'm gonna go with a refund a maybe go with a poo card until the X2's are out.

I still think I prefer a single core solution but first impressions are everything when you're spending this much on a graphics card.

Reason for the cack card though and not my 88GT is that I sold that today to my sisters bloke.

/story

 

[Bungral]

Ok I offcially hate my card. I was gonna use it for a little longer until I could be arsed to send it back and it's just

e. It's drivers are playing havoc with my system and Ntune is buggered as well as even using my tv as my monitor to watch stuff on. It makes faces dark and red.

Stupid bloody thing.

 

[SwaleSmith]

Your probabley getting low scores due to a bug where the card willnot witch to 3d performance mod usualy happens when you overclock the card with app's such as rivatuner. although I'm not sure if this was fixed In later driver revisions, what version you using???

and what is the core temp, kinda sounds like you may have a faulty card, these card are awesome but there are a few dodgy ones floating around, stick to a good brand such as BFG or EVGA am using 3 BFG OCX further overclcoked to 70mhz core linked shader and sweet as a nut.

 

[Bungral]

The card was well fooked!!

It was burning up just sitting on FarCry 1's main screen... The lil background floating around had the card hitting 108 degrees and then underclocking itself just to cool down.

Sent it back and got an X2.