Introduction

For those with longer memories, you would probably recall the presence of 'Turbo' buttons on your computer and pushing them meant a boost in clock speeds. This was commonly found on older computers of the Intel 286 and 386 era but gradually became redundant as software were no longer written to run with machines of a fixed speed as clock speeds and processing power ramped up to the gigahertz era.

Of course in this industry, things have a way of coming back from the dead, whether in its original or an altered form and the turbo button seems to be the inspiration that MSI is channeling with some of its recent products. First, there is the GX600 gaming notebook with a large Turbo button to instantly increase the front side bus of the notebook and hence its clock speed and performance. And joining this mini revival started by MSI is the company's new mid-range graphics card, the NX8600GT Twin Turbo, which comes with a similar button (simply marked 'TT') to boost performance.

MSI's latest bid to jazz up the mid-range GeForce 8600 series is the Twin Turbo, a graphics card with two BIOS chips onboard, each with different BIOS settings.

Implemented by having two separate CMOS chips onboard, both containing different and overclocked video BIOS settings, the blurb on MSI's packaging boasts that with the TT button enabled, the card can reach up to the performance level of a GeForce 8600 GTS. As the performance gap between the GeForce 8600 GT and the GTS is rather substantial, this is an audacious claim to say the least. Whether MSI can back that up is something that we'll be finding out soon in the benchmarks. Before that, a quick check of the card's clock speeds reveals some interesting tidbits of information, which we have condensed in the table below: