It’s an interesting co-incidence that we received the 8X AGP version of the MX440 from MSI and Gainward on the same day and have that repeated for the 8X AGP Ti4200. Just a couple of days back, we got NV28 based cards from both of these manufacturers within a couple of hours of each other. Now, we’ve already looked at the ASUS NV28 which is spec’d higher than your “standard” NV28. Both the cards that we’ll be looking at today are based on nVidia's specification- the core running at 250MHz and the memory at 515MHz. So lets get down and dirty with the MSI VTD-8X and the Gainward Ultra650/8X XP. We'll start off with a gallery and head straight to the benchmarks.

The MSI card didnt have a front cover which is why you dont see any pictures of that, but the Gainward had their standard box-art which we feel needs to be replaced with something more colorful and funkier to grab the buyer's attention. Inside, the Gainward comes with the VIVO cable as well as some software like WinCoder and Serious Sam, but just like the MX series, the software bundle on the MSI is a lot better offering full versions of Morrowind, Ghost Recon and Duke Nuke'm Manhatten project along with lots of utilities. For VIVO, MSI bundles a break-out box.

Both the cards have heatsinks on the core as well as memory, however, we think that the MSI one looks better with a copper plate and a clear fan on top. MSI also sticks some thermal paste on the RAM chips as well as behind the core as you can see from the picture which is definitely a very good thing. The heatsinks on the Gainward were very firmly stuck and since we have to return the card to the distributor we couldn't really fight much with it.