While MSI is targeting their N275GTX Lightning at the enthusiast overclocker crowd, my feeling is that a completely different group of people will fall in love with this card very quickly. If you can't stand the fan noise emitted by the PC, but still want some decent gaming performance then this seems to be the card to get. In idle there is barely any fan noise at all - I can imagine this card being used in any media PC. Should you need some rendering power, the GT200 GPU is ready to fulfill all your needs. MSI's N275GTX Lightning has plenty of steam to play all the latest and greatest games at resolutions up to 1920x1200 with full details and some additional AA eye candy turned on. What makes this card stand out from the crowd is that it does so without ramping up the fan to sound like a leafblower.
While I wouldn't describe the card as "silent" during gaming, it is still the quietest card in its performance class. It is a fact that modern GPUs produce a lot of heat when stressed and that the cooling solution needs to deal with that somehow. You can't make heat magically disappear. It seems that MSI has found an excellent balance between cooling performance and noise levels. One reason why this is possible is the significantly reduced power consumption. In our testing we found that the MSI N275GTX with 1792 MB memory and an overclock out of the box consumes less power than the NVIDIA reference design GTX 275 with 896 MB. MSI has been throwing a lot of nice marketing words at us concerning their improvements to components, and I was genuinely surprised to see that those changes actually improve something.
While a framebuffer size of 1792 MB sounds very in theory, we haven't seen a single application in our test suite benefit from the increased memory size. Yes, there is GTA IV which lets you choose higher settings if you have 1 GB+, but that's more because of its horrible engine design and not because that amount of memory is actually required. Another letdown was the included overclocking utility, it is simple (which is good) but the voltage change functionality is extremely limited. Being able to increase the voltage by 0.075 V is like putting Shell V-Power with a 100 octane rating into your normal fuel car, it may look good on paper, it may even make a difference, but the difference is so small that you will not notice it during daily use - other than your boosted ego.
Nevertheless, seeing MSI add such overclocking features speaks for itself and shows that the company is willing to support overclockers. Another unique overclocking feature on the N275GTX Lightning are the voltage readout points for VGPU and VMem. If you know what you are doing they are easy to find on any graphics card, but this is a simple feature that costs nothing to implement and makes life easier for the user.
I find MSI's price of USD 306 competitive when compared to GTX 275 cards with 1792 MB or when considering the silent aspects of the card. The included HDMI cable is also certainly worth a few bucks, so that brings the card's price below USD 300. If you are just looking for bang for the buck and don't care about noise, and need a high-end card, then a GTX 275 with 896 MB is certainly the better deal.