The bundled driver CD contains a wealth of utilities either directly contained on the CD or via download links. As with all driver CDs, it is certainly worthwhile using the most up-to-date driver obtained from the manufacturer website which will likely have more fixes and updated performance than the outdated (Forceware 266.58) ones found on the CD itself. For testing we used the latest official driver from NVIDA, Forceware 280.26.



First up we see that MSI have included there very popular Afterburner Overclocking and monitoring software. I would however recommend downloading the latest Beta version, (beta 5 at the time of writing this review). Afterburner is perhaps the best overclocking tool on the market at present and the latest version available on the MSI website caters for most popular NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards.

Kombuster is also included which is a tool that will stress a GPU to its absolute limits. Based on FurMark technology and created by Ozone3D, this utility synthesizes the maximum stress a GPU will be placed under. While no games are currently able to put a GPU under so much pressure, utilities such as this are a good benchmark to assess a 'worst case' scenario and are therefore invaluable when overclocking to judge for stability as they will pick up artifects much quicker than a game, cutting the amount of time it takes to find a maximum, stable overclock.



AIWI is a unique software that connects your PC to your iPhone/iPod touch. Once they are connected, you can use your iPhone/iPod touch as a wireless keyboard or touchpad, assist you in a presentation or anytime you wish to remote control your PC.



Included in the bundle is a trial version of Cyberlinks DVD solution; an all-in-one package allowing the user to play back, edit, burn, store and copy DVD content.
There's also a 60 day trial of the popular Norton Internet security software should you find your own Internet security not up to the task.



There's a free copy of TMPGEnc included too which allows the user to encode and compress video files to your chosen file format.

Finally there is the MSI Live Update utility which can either manually or automatically search, download and update your graphics cards BIOS and drivers.

Overall the bundled software is of good quality. The Afterburner tool is essential in my opinion when overclocking, such is the polished operation of this utility. My one major gripe is that there is no headlining game included with the graphics card nor is there an copy of Futuremarks 3DMark 2011 benchmark despite the packaging saying it is 3DMark 11 ready which was a shame.

Enough of me talking, it's time to put the card to the test...