X-bit labs

MSI StarForce 815 Review

Category: Video

by FastSite

[ 08/07/2000 | 12:00 AM ]

One more graphics card built on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS. Available for a very low cost, this graphics cardfeatures 3D Turbo II overclocking utility and shows pretty high performance in all major benchmarks.

Table of contents:

• Closer Look
  
• Overclocking
  
• Installation and Drivers
  
• Performance
  
• Conclusions
  

MSI products have always been known for their high-quality design and relatively low prices. ixbtLABS has already reviewed the whole bunch of MSI products including mainboards and graphics cards. There is hardly any chipset left, which MSI hasn't used. Here we have to point out that nearly all MSI graphics cards are almost an exact copy of the reference card that's why there are hardly any causes for concern in terms of the card's reliability or stability. MSI graphics cards based on new NVIDIA chipsets are usually among the first ones to appear in the market. Unfortunately, this time seems to be an exception and MSI started shipping its GeForce2 GTS based products a bit later than its competitors. That's why our today's review of a StarForce 815 graphics card appears a bit late.

Nevertheless, StarForce 815 has already appeared in retail and is available at quite a low price (almost one of the lowest) even for a complete package. Anyway, we are ready to share our findings regarding it with you today.

So, let's take a closer look at a graphics card from GeForce2 GTS family offered by MSI: StarForce 815.

Closer Look

Here is the list of MSI StarForce 815 main features:

• NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, 256-bit GPU
• 25 Million Polygons/sec, 800 Million Pixels/sec
• 350MHz RAMDAC resolution up to 2048x1536
• 32-bit Z-buffer/stencil
• Display Modes:
  
  

  Resolution	Colors	Vertical Refresh Rate
  640x480	8/16/32 bits	60Hz to 240Hz
  800x600	8/16/32 bits	60Hz to 240Hz
  1024x768	8/16 bits	60Hz to 240Hz
  1024x768	32 bits	60Hz to 200Hz
  1152x864	8/16 bits	60Hz to 200Hz
  1152x864	32 bits	60Hz to 170Hz
  1280x960	8/16 bits	60Hz to 170Hz
  1280x960	32 bits	60Hz to 150Hz
  1280x1024	8/16 bits	60Hz to 170Hz
  1280x1024	32 bits	60Hz to 150Hz
  1600x900	8/16 bits	60Hz to 150Hz
  1600x900	32 bits	60Hz to 120Hz
  1600x1200	8/16 bits	60Hz to 120Hz
  1600x1200	32 bits	60Hz to 100Hz
  1920x1080	8/16 bits	60Hz to 100Hz
  1920x1080	32 bits	60Hz to 85Hz
  1920x1200	8/16 bits	60Hz to 100Hz
  1920x1200	32 bits	60Hz to 85Hz
  1920x1440	8/16 bits	60Hz to 85Hz
  1920x1440	32 bits	60Hz to 75Hz
  2048x1536	8/16 bits	60Hz to 75Hz
  2048x1536	32 bits	60Hz

We won't discuss the peculiarities of GeForce2 GTS GPU from NVIDIA in detail, because we have already devoted enough time and effort to it in this Review.

Now here is the today's piece. Look:

The card has AGP 2x/4x interface, 32MB 6ns DDR SGRAM located in 8 chips on both sides of the PCB.

The memory chips are made by Infineon and should work at 166MHz.

And they do work at this frequency. Note that sometimes the end clock frequency of DDR memory given is twice as high as it actually is, because these numbers look more impressive. However, it hardly matters for real practice. In other words, if you see that DDR memory working frequency written equals to 333MHz, then you should read it as 166MHz.

Further examination of the PCB showed that the graphics card hardly differs from the reference design. The chipset is equipped with an ordinary active flat cooler sending the warm airflow sideward. There is no daughter card with a TV-Out on the MSI StarForce 815 piece we had at our disposal. The PCB is of dark-yellow color, which is MSI cards' distinguishing feature. The PCB is already equipped with a connector for a daughter card with a TV-Out and has a special empty spot for digital monitors connector.

The graphics card is supplied in Retail package in MSI traditionally designed box.

The card is accompanied with a user's manual and a CD-disk with the drivers and utilities.

Overclocking

Unfortunately, this graphics piece failed to show super overclockability. The chipset could reach the maximum of 210MHz and the memory - only 360MHz. These results are the most modest against thre background of the other cards reviewed. That is why we don't expect the card to show any tangible performance growth.

Installation and Drivers

And now we are going to speak about some practical things. At first take a look at our testing system configuration:

• Intel Pentium III 733MHz CPU;
• Chaintech 6ATA4 (VIA Apollo Pro 133A) mainboard;
• 256MB PC133 system memory;
• IBM DPTA 20GB HDD;
• ViewSonic P810 (21") monitor;
• MS Windows 98 SE.

The work with the graphics card usually starts with the drivers installation. So, we will also start here. The card goes with the drivers from MSI based on NVIDIA reference drivers version 5.16. These drivers look absolutely the same as the reference drivers therefore we won't dwell here for long. The only thing we would like to point out in this respect is the possibility to access the driver settings either via the display settings or via the manager, which icon is located in the system tray, in the lower right corner.

Taking into account that ver. 5.16 was far not the latest version, we tested this graphics card with NVIDIA reference drivers ver. 5.32.

The most interesting thing about the drivers is 3D Turbo II utility, which is supplied together with them and may turn out very helpful for users when setting the 2D parameters:

as well as the virtual desktop:

3D Turbo II utility also includes a special page devoted to chipset and memory overclocking:

Performance

Well, we will start with 2D-graphics. In the previous reviews we have mentioned perfect quality and high performance in 2D shown by the cards based on GeForce2 GTS. Now we can only state that MSI StarForce 815 proved up to the mark in 2D (it is the similarity to NVIDIA reference design that tells). Graphics cards of this kind meet the requirements of the absolute majority of users.

We will work with the following two games to consider the performance of MSI StarForce 815 in 3D-graphics:

• Rage Expendable (Direct3D, multitexturing);
• id Software Quake3 v.1.16h, demo002 (OpenGL, multitexturing).

These two tools should be quite enough to give us a good idea of the graphics card's performance when working via two main API. For a more illustrative comparison we added the results shown by two more graphics cards to our charts: ASUS AGP-V7700 and NVIDIA reference card based on GeForce2 GTS. We will also show the performance of the overclocked MSI StarForce 815.

You can see pretty well that MSI StarForce 815 runs almost neck and neck with NVIDIA reference card in Quake3 and Expendable. As for the performance shown by the overclocked card, the results are hardly that striking. The performance gain is not that noticeable at all (except Quake3 16bpp), which we have actually expected. Note that MSI graphics card worked with minimal external cooling (there was just one more cooler in the case). Of course, we can't generalize the results shown by this graphics card and refer them to all cards based on GeForce2 GTS (besides, we don't think there is any other graphics card overclocking so poorly :), however, we still have some hope that overclocking fans will find a nice piece for their needs.

Conclusions

So, this MSI StarForce 815 piece is a mass product and the cards from this family are already available in retail. The tests showed that it didn't yield to the reference card from NVIDIA. MSI StarForce 815 is an exact copy of NVIDIA reference design and unfortunately, this piece has rather mediocre overclocking potential. However, the major advantage of this graphics card unlike the entire GeForce2 GTS based society is its low price: the lowest of all! So, the user can now buy a card on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS for the price of NVIDIA GeForce256 with DDR SGRAM from the first shipments.

No doubt, the price will keep falling, which will reduce the price gap between the graphics cards on NVIDIA GeForce256 DDR and the analogues of the today's hero. We would like to stress that the card's overclockability depends on the piece that is why we wouldn't dare say that poor overclockability of our piece gives us a good idea of the entire family.

Highs:

• Super high performance, which corresponds to the today's most powerful accelerators;
• High quality card design and implementation;
• Attractive cost.

Lows:

• No digital monitors connector;
• Low overclockability;
• No games included in the accompanying software bundle.