MSI's Starforce 822 GeForce3 ViVo!


MSI's Starforce 822 GeForce3 ViVo! - Page 2

MSI's GeForce 3 Powered Starforce 822 ViVo
Not Just a GF3...It May Be "The" GeForce 3!

By, Marco Chiappetta
November 8, 2001

THE CARD:

We like to give every new product to arrive in the lab a thorough physical inspection before installing it into our test rig.

If you take a look at the external plate, you will see a standard DB15 Analog VGA connector, an S-Video out connector and the standard composite Video-In and Video-Out connectors (ViVo).  The  capabilities of the ViVo daughter-board are handled by a Philips SAA7108E chip.  The TV-Out was on par with other GeForce 3s that we have tested.  We quickly captured some video from a standard VCR with good results as well, but keep in mind that capturing video from an analog composite input will be only as clean as the signal coming in.

The next item that stands out is the oversized cooling hardware.  When assembled, the memory heatsinks and chipset cooler look like they are one piece, but they are not.  The main heatsink has a 9-finned fan that sits directly over the GPU, and the memory heatsinks are firmly mounted atop EliteMT 3.8ns DDR RAM with thermal tape.  We removed the heatsink and were VERY pleased to find an almost perfect application of thermal paste!  Finally, someone did it right!  Thank You, MSI.

Installation / Setup Of The MSI Starforce 822 GeForce 3
By The Book...

 

Installation of the Starforce 822 was very quick and painless.  We were starting with a clean OS install, so all we did was pop in the card, install the drivers and we were up and running.

 

THE DRIVERS:

 

By now, you should all be familiar with nVidia's reference drivers, but we figured since the MSI Starforce 822 ships with standard reference drivers we would give you another quick look...

 

     

     

 

Not having to use any "proprietary" drivers will make for easy upgrades.  You won't have to wait for your manufacturer to "catch up" to nVidia to take advantage of any extra features with the Starforce 822.

 

Overclocking with the MSI Starforce 822 GeForce3
Plenty of Headroom...

 

The card may ship with reference drivers, but MSI includes their "3D Turbo" utility to tweak the Starforce 822.  Besides giving users the ability to overclock their cards, the 3D Turbo Utility allows users to tweak color settings and image placement, among other things.

 

                         

            

 

We found MSI's 3D Turbo application to be very useful.  The interface is clean and very easy to navigate.  We especially likes the ability to run multiple "virtual desktops".  If you're like me and constantly have numerous applications open, you may find it easier to keep organized...you can run all of your design applications on one desktop, productivity applications on another, etc..etc..

 

We used 3D Turbo to overclock our Starforce 822 all the way up to 260MHz. core and 561MHz. memory.  This was a substantial increase in core and memory clockspeeds, and as you'll see later this equated to substantial performance gains, especially at higher resolutions.

 


 

3D Turbo also places an icon in you system tray giving users quick access to common resolutions and the other sections of the program.

 

It's MadOnion Time!

 

Tags:  MSI, GeForce, MS, E3, rf, force, AR

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