Overclocking

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of GPUTool and our benchmarking suite.
The overclocks listed here were achieved with the default fan and voltage settings as defined in the VGA BIOS. Please note that every single sample overclocks differently, that's why our results here can only serve as a guideline for what you can expect from your card.



The overclocks of our card are 725 MHz core (4% overclock) and 1050 MHz Memory (7% overclock). To be honest, I expected more overclocking potential at this default voltage of 1.15 V. I've seen GTX 275 cards overclock well into the 750 MHz range with stock cooler and voltage. However, MSI'S N275GTX has an ace up its sleeves: GPU voltage control.



The MSI Lightning Utility is kept fairly simple. It has one window which lets you adjust GPU Voltage, Core clock, Memory clocks and Fan speed. The available GPU voltage options range from 1.0665 V (default) up to 1.1415 V, which is an increase of 0.075 V - hardly worth mentioning. Under load this corresponds to voltages of 1.1998 V to 1.2748 V as displayed by the Utility.

Increasing the voltage all the way to the maximum allowed me to go from 725 MHz max. core to 730 MHz - certainly not worth it to install and tweak with an additional application.

Overclocked Performance

Using these clock frequencies we ran a quick test of Call of Duty 4 to evaluate the gains from overclocking.


The actual 3D performance gained from overclocking is 6.7%.

Temperatures

The temperatures look very good. Actually for my taste they are a bit on the low side, a bit higher temperatures would have allowed an even quieter card. Nevertheless, the power draw, fan noise and temperature show that MSI did an excellent job optimizing their card.