MSI has brought a sleek and sexy video card to the market with the N275GTX Lightning. But with its high MSRP and its late release into this generation of video cards, what kind of value can it actually give us moving forward? We'll compare it with a stock NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 and AMD Radeon HD 4890 to find out what this technical masterpiece has to offer.

Introduction

Microstar International (MSI) is a Taiwan-based computer hardware manufacturer founded in 1986. Primarily a designer and manufacturer of PC motherboards, MSI has expanded their business into barebones PCs, servers and workstations, communications devices, consumer electronics, Notebooks, Netbooks, graphics cards, and other various electronic products. Their company motto "Quality Products Create Faithful Customer" belies their underlying corporate strategy of designing and manufacturing quality devices for various markets and letting their high-quality reputation earn them the trust and respect of electronics consumers worldwide. In fact, their Intel P55 chipset based P55-GD80 motherboard recently won an Editor's Choice Gold award here at HardOCP.

Today, we are going to be examining one of their new line of "Lightning" video cards, featuring elevated clock speeds and custom cooling devices. The video card in question today is the MSI N275GTX Lightning, featuring an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 GPU and 1792MB of GDDR3 memory.

It was just about a year ago that Intel introduced the Core i7 1366 family to us and took the world by storm. The hyperthreading capabilities were amazing and the overclocking abilities were second to none. It was as if the CPU world had been turned upside down. The motherboard manufacturers began producing X58 motherboards with excellent performance and plenty of bells and whistles to push the performance of the 1366 chips. Now, this technology is about to hit its middle ages at the ripe old age of one year old and, as computer technology goes, it was time for a new baby to be born.