MSI N250GTS-2D1G OC GeForce GTS 250 Video Card Review :: Bundle

• Driver CD
• Quick User's Guide
• DVI to HDMI Adapter
• DVI to VGA/D-sub adapter
• HDMI Audio cable
• MSI N250GTS video card
• Call of Duty World at War

MSI sent the bare card with no bundle included. As this is a retail product, the bundle indicated above is of the packaging from Newegg. NVIDIA has partnered with several etailers to include Call of Duty World at War as a software bundle with many of their cards. The other components include a HDMI to DVI adapter, a DVI to D-sub adapter and a HDMI cable.

MSI bundles their video card with several utilities including MSI Live Update, Dual Core Center, GoodMem, LockBox, WMInfo, Vivid, Live, E-Color, MediaRing, ShowShift, ThinSoft Be Twin, and Norton Internet Security 60 Days Trial. GoodMem helps increase the physical memory size and monitors memory usage by the system. WMI Info is a system information utility.

NVIDIA has taken to releasing a new driver every month like ATI, which is a good thing. MSI's drivers are not very up-to-date as the latest driver on their website for the GeForce GTS 250 is 178.24 which were released last year. NVIDIA's reference drivers are up to 185.20 which were released this month. I always suggest using the latest NVIDIA drivers with your new video card.

Idle temp

Stress temp while overclocked

Idle temperatures on the card were observed to be around 36C. Considering that idle temperatures of the 9800GT were around 39C under similar ambient temperatures. Stress temperatures of about 63C were observed during running of 3DMark Vantage with HWMonitor. Overclocking the MSI card was pretty successful. Note to use CoreCell you need to use the MSI supplied driver and most people will want to use the NVIDIA Performance utility to overclock as it does the same thing. I was able to overclock the core to 850MHz without issue, a 90MHz overclock.