Product Reviews

The graphics card is a vital PC component for anyone interested in playing games. We've seen a few systems now with cards from the new nVidia 9000 series, and here's an affordable card to upgrade existing PCs. Its chipset isn't the latest, but for this price range the N9600GT performed exceptionally well. In fact, given that it's essentially a cut-down 8800GT, we had to check our results twice to convince ourselves. MSI have made the processor and memory run faster than normal, and our 3D tests showed it was worth the effort. Our Call of Duty 2 benchmark ran only slightly slower than with the considerably more expensive Asus EN8800GT.

The N9600GT was noticeably

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faster than the Sapphire HD3850, our Best Buy six months ago, although this has dropped from £106 to around £85. We'd expect the MSI to cope with all the new games released this year, and you can't hope for much more unless you spend serious money.

Like most modern graphics cards, the MSI can also enable your PC to play HD video, as long as your main processor is powerful enough. Any dual core processor should get Blu-ray movies playing smoothly, and the combination of the N9600GT and a Blu-ray drive is a tempting upgrade for under £200. The only catch is the card's dual slot design, which means it takes up a lot of room. At least it has an 80mm fan, which kept it very quiet.

There are two DVI outputs for flat screen monitors, with adapters to convert one to HDMI (for HD TV sets) and the other to VGA. There's even a special cable that connects to your sound card or motherboard to route audio via HDMI to minimise cable clutter. If you want to connect an older TV without HDMI, there's also an adapter that provides a component video output. Considering that MSI also bundles Colin McRae: DiRT - an excellent rally game - with the card, it's great value.