What MSI have done with the N550GTX-Ti M2D1GD5 is produce a video card that is quick, capable and generally friendly on the pocket. In fact, sticking two or more of these cards in your machine in SLi configuration would not break the bank… nor would it disappoint in terms of performance.

Even when a single one of these cards is used, its performance is good. It performs a bit better than expected from a standard N550GTX chipset, thanks to a bit of tweaking done to the card by MSI. The chipset is fairly fast, and the 1GB of GDDR5 RAM on-board does a lot to help the card deliver a smooth performance.

It has also got a number of bells and whistles to help the user along. First off is the Afterburner software, that MSI ships with all of their VGA cards. This overclocking software makes tweaking the card easy and pretty safe, too. Of course, squeezing more power out of any computer component can have undesirable effects, but the Afterburner package is well put together, and allows for the best options to be easily accessed. It also allows for customisable performance for 2D and 3D modes, meaning that the user can keep temperatures down and even use less power when possible. An advanced fan speed controller will further help to keep the card cool.

Speaking of keeping cool, this card has a rather striking housing built over its large heat sink and single fan configuration. Moving away from the boxy look, the red and black housing, with a few nice curves, looks a bit more mature than the run-of-the-mill graphics card. It is also thankfully devoid of images on luscious maidens in chainmail bikinis, or the like.

The card handles overclocking beautifully too, without heavy spikes in noise or temperature. You can squeeze a lot more out of this card if you tweak it just right, and sunning an SLi configuration will deliver excellent results. As with most PC equipment these days, this VGA card makes use of high grade components – Military Grade is the favoured catch-phrase – including solid capacitors and solid state chokes. These deliver less noise, less heat and a better lifespan. They also won’t explode which, as we have pointed out before, is always a boon inside a PC case.

And all of this comes at a really good price tag. In fact, some buyers may be dissuaded by the price, thinking that it is too low for a high quality product. But, quite honestly, this is one of the best deals we have seen when it comes to graphics cards, and heartily recommend it. It might not deliver true top end performance but, for the most part, you will not be disappointed with what it does.

Verdict:

A good card at a great price.

PROS:

CONS:

• Not the most powerful card around

Buy

You can buy the graphics card at Amazon and other online retailers.

A rule of thumb is that MSI Afterburner supports most Geforce and Radeon cards providing that the drivers installed are not to old. Try updating the drivers if the video card is not recognized by the software immediately.

MSI Afterburner is based on Rivatuner, another popular video card configuration software. The program displays a hardware monitor and core information about the graphic card on startup.

The core information include the graphics card name and driver version as well as the core voltage, core clock, shader clock, memory clock and fan speed. The availability of these values depends largely on the graphics card itself, if it is supported it should be shown.

msi afterburner software

Sliders are available to change these core parameters directly. The hardware monitor on the right side displays max and min values. These again depend largely on the capabilities of the video card. It is for instance possible to see the graphics card maximum and minimum temperature, fan speed and core clock changes.

Settings can directly be saved in profiles. This is handy for overclocking or underclocking the graphics card in specific situations. It is for example possible to create one standard profile, one overclocked profile for gaming and other gpu intensive tasks and one underclocked profile for situations where the graphics card is not needed at all.

The settings button leads to an extensive configuration menu. Here it is possible to change the behavior of the card’s fan, the hardware monitoring, on-screen display and profiles among other options.

Fan Speed

The fan speed controls can be changed from automatic to user defined. This opens a graph where the fan speed can be adjusted to the temperature of the graphics card. The fan speed could for instance be lowered if the gpu temperature is low and increased if it increases.

fan speed

Hardware Monitoring

Hardware monitoring graphs can be enabled or disabled in this tab. It is furthermore possible to activate hardware monitoring history logging which can be helpful when troubleshooting video card problems.

hardware monitoring

Hotkeys can be assigned to the profiles that have been created to switch easily between them. There is also an option to set automatic 2D and 3D profiles which will then be automatically enabled whenever the system uses 2D and 3D applications (meaning gpu-less and gpu intensive processes).

An onscreen display can be configured in the MSI Afterburner software to display relevant information directly. This – and some other settings – require a server process that needs to be running in the background.

Computer users with multiple gpus can configure the clock, voltage and fan speed individually or in sync.

MSI Afterburner is an interesting tool for users who want to tweak their graphics card. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Downloads are available directly at the MSI website.

The motherboard manufacturers Gigabyte, Asus and MSI have developed a software update for Windows that will enable quick charging the Apple devices. The software update improves the charging speed by up to 50% and can even charge the device in multiple power stages.

Apple devices users who use Windows computer systems might want to head over to Gigabyte, Asus or MSI to download the new drivers that improves the charging time of their devices.

Gigabyte is the only company that is restricting the software to specific motherboards. Reports at Engadget suggest that it is possible to install the drivers on unsupported hardware as well as they are showing a video of a user who is using the Asus software on Sony laptops.

Users who double-click on the msi file directly will also install the application but with the possibility that it will not run properly on the computer system. Take a computer program that requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 for example. If the user has an older version of the framework installed setup.exe will download the files needed and launch the installation of the compatible framework and launch the installation using the msi file afterwards.

If the user installs using the msi file the installation will go through without problems but might experience an application crash or warning message while starting the application. It is therefor recommend on end user systems to always install applications using the setup.exe file if both a setup.exe and xyz.msi are available after unpacking the software program.

There are even some msi setup files out there that will not perform the installation upon execution but request an installation using the setup.exe file instead to ensure that all necessary components are installed.

A guy suggested to use the freeware RivaTuner which he said was able to reduce the fan speed of my video card by altering the fan speed directly. This was the solution I was looking for. I quickly downloaded and installed Rivatuner. The only thing left was to lower the fan speed and make the changes permanent.

I clicked on customize in the first screen that appeared right next to Forceware detected and selected the icon for system settings from the panel. The second tab was named fan, the goal of my search. I was able to define a fan speed value for three different states: standard 2D, low power 3D and performance 3D. I changed the settings from 100% to 25 in standard 2D mode, 50% for low power 3D and 100% for performance 3D. 2D means everything that you do normally in windows like using office, surfing the internet or writing an email.

I checked the box that saved the settings and applied them at every system start and voila – the noise was gone. From one second to the next it was gone. My pc is almost silent now, the noisiest part is my external hard drive, everything else is almost silently. (I bought a low noise cpu fan and power supply).

I suggest you take a look at Rivatuner if you face a similar problem like I did. It might solve yours too