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That $15 rebate isn't coming back if it's MSI.
The POS fan is loud and if the quality doesn't hold up, expect the RMA to tell you it's your fault it broke.
Go Asus or EVGA if you don't want any troubles.

I have received three out of three rebate this year from MSI, do you morons know how to follow directions? Let me guess the slower caselicker "fans" can't figure out how to complete a rebate, what a surprise. Don't look now here comes one of his baconnaise cart followers...

#2 dumb ass, many people do get their rebates denied despite following all instructions to the dot - your IQ must be really low for you to make a post like that..

#2, we're all sharing our experiences to help other "bensbargainers" make informed purchase decisions.
It's great that you've had good results, I'm happy for you. However, I've had just horrible experiences, but that's on me for buying cheap. Hit and miss rebate, poor tech support, and horrible rma process.
The name calling shows how immature you really are.
Would you call the Prius drivers "morons" who don't know how to drive? Guess what, thanks to the them, people know to stay away from Prius until Toyota fixes the problems.

#1/4, there are also plenty of other Toyota drivers as well. So does that mean that because you've had one MSI product with bad results, support, and rebate (which most often is not administrated by the company itself), that means everyone should stay away from them?

Brand loyalty is about as retarded as 90% of the people on this website, and that's pretty bad. Get what's good, what other people say is good, and generally, you won't have issues. My guess is you didn't do research on that before buying this card. Caveat emptor.

If 5% of people have their rebate denied it creates a false perception that a "lot" do because those 5% make sure to mention it while the other 95% don't.

You can check your MSI rebate status here:

http://service.msicomputer.com/rebate/Status.aspx

Last MSI rebate I sent in a week or two ago and it looks like it's doing fine, show up on their site rebate search as valid.

I do agree you may have a bit better luck with the two other aforementioned brands, but if you have to pay more to buy those brands you are deciding for yourself how much extra to pay for better support. 9 times out of 10 (?) you won't need any support.

HOWEVER, this looks fairly high priced for what it is relative to other GPU series, a 240GT even if it has 1GB memory which it arguably doesn't need being a low-midrange card that will be GPU bottlenecked before amount of memory is a bottleneck.

Well said #6. We need more posts like that and less name-calling!

#5 and #6, I am not disagreeing with you on your concepts.
However, based on what you're saying, the 5% with the bad experiences do not matter?
In any business practices, 5% failure rate is already too high to continue to conduct business.
Customer satisfaction rate needs to be at 90% or higher, and product failure rate and rebate denial rate should be at less than 1% if all due diligence is done.
In either case, MSI has a high rebate denial rate and product defect rate. Google "MSI defect" or "MSI rebate scam" and see how many instances make up your "5%".

Lastly, I want to mention that Palit has this card for $65
http://bensbargains.net/deal/133700/

When you buy products, except if only one product of it's kind exists, you're always making the choice of what to spend on product quality and customer service.

It's easy to suggest people should pay more for the highest quality and service but let's face it, many many people instead opt to save money and gamble a bit on the outcome.

I can't decide for you what gamble you want to make, some people pay even more for extended warranties which is something I never do, but I'm fairly good at fixing things myself and if something is a type of product prone to failure I look for a warranty period long enough it won't be terribly upsetting if product fails one day after the warranty expires.

As for rebate rejection %, it's the same thing. I don't condone rejecting rebates at any percentage level but the truth remains that if you factor for this, you can still come out ahead on rebates if the average rebate rejection rate is 5% and you save, on average, more than 5%... so it's up to you to decide what cost reduction vs rebate fulfillment rate is worth the gamble.

Everything is a gamble though, I thought I made a good buy when I bought an Abit motherboard but now, Abit is out of that business... at least they paid the rebate before that happened but ultimately I don't buy things that are overpriced and hope for a rebate, instead only things I would pay the pre-rebate price for if I really had to.

I don't consider it bad to mention poor rebate experiences with any particular company but there's such a thing as over-doing it too, and realizing that if you only do a web search for some company and bad customer experiences, any company that sells a lot of product will have many thousands of web search hits finding customer complaints so if you use that as a reason to avoid a company soon enough there's no company left to buy anything from.

It's your choice, by all means buy fro... [Truncated]

#9 Pretty Smart.. took the words out of my mouth. Not to bragg or what, I did more than a 1000+ and counting rebates in my life time. When I say one thousand, I try to look small. Some call me rebates King, I'am not.. Just trying to save a few bucks here and there like everone else and got good at it. I win 85% of the time and the percentage is getting better and better. cause I got wiser. Look at this way, If you go to a Casino and put 100 bucks on a table and bet just one hand, your odds of winning is 50/50 Same with Rebates. But! The odds is better with rebates, Example: Every 10 rebates you send, Expect two rebates your not going to get NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO CORRECTLY,That's the facts of Life. Here the tricks, scan and save all rebates, call if you do not get the rebates in timely of 4month you can increast that odds by just a little bit also. I already understand rebates before I play this game. You just got to win, 80% of the time, and if you don't win, don't play. In the long run,you can count your chips and you will see your winnings in savings.. (Always! Remember buy what you need, Not what on Sales. Those are my own rules I set for myself to save money.)

No one is Stupid, Retailer and Manufactured is getting good at loopols and tricks and petty way to denial your rebates. you just got to be one step ahead and simply win..

All this over, "the card that doesn't matter"...

In case anybody cares about the GT240/DDR5 flavor (the only one worth caring about - the DDR3 is only viable as a 4650 beater and the price of the 3's need to compete there), I bought the $60 MSI version 6 weeks ago (for a week there it was $50) and it runs like a champ in a stock, 305 Watt Dell box/PSU (an Inspiron 546, FWIW - I'm an AMD supporter when it makes sense). It's basically as good as a 9600GT and uses much less power. It beats a 4670 *at $60* and that's that.
This is too much money for this card - the 1GB won't help much and there's no reason to pay for it.

<table width="90%" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3" border="0" align="center"><tr> <td><span class="genmed"><b>dave_c wrote:</td> </tr> <tr> <td class="quote">... but that (review) was at it's MSRP, not so much when you can get it under $75 and consider it a niche product for systems where you don't have the 6 pin connector or ample 12V current reserve to handle something better endowed.

Dare I also mention that despite differences in opinion about drivers, I'd easily pay 20% more per performance to have nVidia drivers?

Recently they had a bug that effected fan speed, I can't ignore that nVidia makes mistakes too, but I can fault somone who changes a driver and doesn't bother to monitor temperature levels because ultimately on a PC vs an embedded system it is up to the user to monitor and deal with ANY changes they make... or not make any, their choice.</td> </tr></table><span class="postbody">

I would concur to what #13 said, that one MSI DDR5 deal (that #12 has also said he picked up) can be a great buy for those lower watt stock box units. Though still that was still working with healthy $30 rebate. When the rebate is like 1/3 the price, remember those MSI 4670 that were $40 back in Oct; I question the vendor inadequacy and reason for dumping them, especially when GT 240 chip's aren't at all yet destined for EoL. What's different about that chip and boards to have MSI build it as $60 product, when they could supposely turned them into the card advertised here for $95?
As I've state about other cut-rate MSI units you can't expect much from such cards especially any OC'n robustness. (personal experience with their 8600GTS) And if it does fail and the retailer has you go-back through MSI it's probably time to cut your losses.

Now, other that that one MSI card I don't believe I've seen a ton of other DDR5 GT240's for $75 or less, one card doesn't make any real-world... [Truncated]

Thought I remembered another deal on a 512Mb GDDR5... it was this Palit GT 240 that Egg had for $71 -AR$10 F/S back on February 23rd! That was a decent buy... while now $81 F/S No rebate it's average.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814261060

Driver quality is always a valid argument to me, I've seen far too many instances when ATI drivers wouldn't even do basic things like install, uninstall, allow access to setting custom resolutions in CCC and don't even get me started about how bloated CCC is.

Buy whatever you like but my money will go to the products I find overall better. I don't really care so much if there's a % difference in FPS, considering every year cards get faster and faster so there's always something fast enough to game with... which is what the game developers have to factor for when designing games anyway.

As for overclocking an 8600GTS, of course it doesn't o'c well. Seasoned overclockers know that to get best o'c you don't pay a premium to buy the higher-end already high clock speed version of a die, you buy the lower clocked version.

Besides, who really cared about o'c an 8600GTS? 8600 overall wasn't a significant jump over 7600, not when at the time you could get 9600GSO dirt cheap after rebate... I recall at least 3 waves of deals on Ben's for those at about $30-35 AR.

Well to the driver instance you commented on I can't say in the last year or more I haven’t come across those basic problems; although a thorough uninstalls had been something I’ve had problems with both CCC and Nvidia Control Panels years ago. Interestingly have you seen this... been popping up regarding Nvidia Control Panel?
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=116722
http://blog.briandicroce.com/2009/08/10/installing-nvidia-drivers-on-windows-7/
http://www.overclock.net/nvidia/687237-nvidia-drivers-wont-install-nvidia-control.html

Everybody has driver issues and one reason I won’t go get the latest or up-date every time right the day they come out. If a do a driver update I do a quick search for trouble... let somebody else be there ginny-pig.

I normally weigh everything for such purchase, and on something’s I care less on $25 purchase, might need more consideration on a $50-60 price. Quality, equipment, fan/cooler, warranty, rebates, free shipping, those all are juggled and saving a few bucks doesn’t always enter the processes. While, if it’s more money say +$150 some things will need more emphasis for all those above and more. It comes down to, you pay for what you get and the value those really bring over the life of the purchase.

Yea, I bought right as the 8800GS came out and hadn't really dumped in price. Most 8600GT only came single slot fans and where most often as much, or more than the... [Truncated]