DIGITIMES daily IT news
DIGITIMES Tech Forum (DTF) 2009 Annual Plan
PRINT Back Back twice
MSI Twin Turbo puts old twist on GPU overclocking
Press release, August 27; Joseph Tsai, DIGITIMES [Monday 27 August 2007]

Micro-Star International's (MSI's) latest graphics card offering puts a twist on the trend of makers releasing Special Edition or overclock versions of their cards in order to offer slightly better performance.

The NX8600GT Twin Turbo carries not one but two vBIOS chips; this allows MSI to provide two sets of core and memory clock settings - normal and turbo - which can be switched between using a button on the back-plate of the card. It reminds us of PCs from the 386 and 486 era which also had a button on the case to adjust system speed "on the fly".

At the end of the day while having two vBIOSes available could be useful as a safety net for the few who are brave enough to flash the BIOS on their graphics cards, having to manually press a switch all seems rather inelegant when the same could be achieved with a software solution. But still, we appreciate the trip down memory lane.

MSI NX8600GT Twin Turbo graphics card specification

Item

Detail

Graphics bus technology

PCI Express

Core clock

540/580MHz

Shader clock

1450/1508MHz

Memory clock

1400/1600MHz

Memory amount

256MB DDR3

Memory interface

128-bit

Memory bandwidth

22.4GB/sec

Fill rate

8.64 billion pixels/sec

RAMDACs

400MHz

Output

Dual dual-link DVI, TV-out

Source: Company, compiled by Digitimes, August 2007

MSI NX8600GT Twin Turbo graphics card with two separated vBIOS

MSI NX8600GT Twin Turbo graphics card with two separate vBIOS chips
Photo: Company

Related stories:

MSI announces availability of gaming GX600 notebook PC (Oct 18)

MSI launches two Intel platform motherboards (Oct 4)

MSI announces AMD Barcelona motherboard and server barebone (Oct 4)

MSI notebook division earns more than motherboards, says paper (Sep 18)

MSI Intel P35 chipset motherboard released (Aug 30)

Acer orders to boost MSI graphics card shipments (Aug 30)

SiS671-based MSI MS-7317 motherboard to enter volume production (Aug 10)

MSI announces new notebook for gamers (Jul 27)

MSI and ECS see profitability improve on HP orders (Jul 18)

Gigabyte, ECS and MSI see rise in June revenues (Jul 9)

MSI and Gigabyte see strong shipment growth in motherboards and graphics cards (Jun 14)

MSI to ship over 800,000 OEM notebooks in 2007 (Jun 12)


 
© DIGITIMES Inc. All rights reserved.
Please do not republish, publicly broadcast or publicly transmit content from this website without written permission from DIGITIMES Inc. Please contact us if you have any questions.