As well as boasting the 8800GTS label MSI have overclocked this card from its standard clock speed of 500Mhz to 575Mhz and its memory speed of 1.6GHz (800Mhz DDR3) to 1.7Ghz (850 Mhz DDR3). Thus it provides a solution for those who are unsure of either how to overclock their card or would prefer to have the manufacturer do it and at least retain the warranty.

Additionally the card provides 320mb DDR3 memory, a 320-bit exchange processor/memory interface, dual DVI ports, dual link DVI, HDTV out, Shader Model 4.0 support and of course Direct-x 10 support.

The overclocked spec puts it close to the same spec as the 8800GTX card minus the slower bit exchange interface which runs at 384-bit on the GTX and the lower memory capacity, the GTX has 756Mb of memory. But it has to be said that the GTS version is a strong performer indeed.

Delving into the contents of the box, like the 8500GT card we reviewed a month or so back it has a series of utilities that are governed to get the most from your card/computer, a VGA power cable, DVI adapter, S-video cable and S-video to HDTV cable. But the real gem in the crown is the inclusion of the excellent Company of Heroes Game, which is definitely one of the best RTS games ever made. It also has the significant bonus of having a DX10 patch available so for Vista owners you can take advantage of improved graphics which the cad was made for.

For testing we ran the card through some tests using Hoc Quake 4 Benchmark and the Prey benchmark software as well as just running the card normally during some heavy gaming sessions, we were lucky in a sense of having the Viewsonic 22" widescreen LCD in at the same time for review because we could play games at 1680 x 1050 without breaking a sweat.

The benchmark (see images below) only shows it running at 1280 x 1024 but as you can see there is not much difference between the other cards in the group when there is no AA ( Antialiasing) or AF ( Anisotropic filtering) settings enabled, but our Test PC was only running an older P4 3.2Ghz CPU which limits its performance. However it's only when adding the fancy graphic options that the 8800GTS pulls ahead - still the benchmark really does not do the card justice.

We opted for a more real world test by playing Command & Conquer 3 and in a nutshell pushed ever single setting to max, at a res of 1680 x 1050 and in the single player mode it worked a charm, only in skirmish mode it started to slow down when there was lots of on-screen action.

We could also run Prey at 1280 x 1024 with 4 x AA and 16 x AF with graphic boost enabled (which is truly designed for 512mb cards) and it scored an average FPS (Frames per second) of 64.

We also set Company of Heroes to 1680 x 1050 and turned on every single setting to the max and again we could not fault its performance.

We never tried to overclock the card much further as it seemed pointless as it was already overclocked, but you do have a utility to help which is called 'Dual Core Centre', though the newer version of the software needs to be downloaded from the MSI website for it to recognise the card.

This utility has a few presets which you can click on at the touch of a button, so by selecting game mode for example it pushes the card up to 603Mhz GPU clock - though you can select settings manually if you so wish.

Note: You will need two blanking plates free in order to install this card.