MSI NX7300GS TD256E

A couple of extra features available on the MSI NX7300GS are Nvidia's TurboCache Technology and MSI's Dynamic Overclocking Technology, or D.O.T.

Special Features TurboCache & D.O.T.(Dynamic Overclocking Technology)

TurboCache: TurboCache basically uses a portion of your computer's system memory as dedicated video memory, which has it's pros and cons. The good news is that you'll have more frame memory available to the GPU. The bad news is that it takes up a portion of your system memory and bandwidth.  With TurboCache you should have at least 512MB or RAM installed in your system to fully benefit from this technology. Since the MSI NX7300GS TD256E already has 256MB of on-board memory, having 256MB or 512MB of system memory won't increase your effective video memory. However, if you're sporting 1GB or more, the card will allocate 256MB of that memory to give you a total of 512MB effective video memory. TurboCache dynamically uses system memory depending on the amount of RAM installed.

D.O.T.: MSI's Dynamic Overclocking Technology is basically a warranty covered overclock. MSI states that it gives "2% ~ 10% / 6-Scale Dynamic Overclocking Performance". The key benefit of D.O.T. is that users don't have to manually change the core and memory speeds of your card; MSI's proprietary software will handle that automatically. While any kind of warranty covered overclock is nice, there is usually still some performance to be found by bumping up clock speeds manually using software like Rivatuner or Coolbits. 

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS: We tested our cards on a Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA motherboard, powered by an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (Winchester Core) processor and 1GB of low-latency Mushkin Redline RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the BIOS and load the "High Performance Defaults."  The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the latest chipset drivers available, installed all of the other necessary drivers for the rest of our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were disabled, the hard drive was defraggmented, and a 768MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of the benchmarking software, and ran the tests.

The HotHardware Test System A Mid to low end gaming rig