Specs/Overclocking

Software

Bundle-wise the MSI card is quite spartan. You won't find outdated games and a truckload of software titles. The Starforce 815 comes with the requisite DVD player, and another program called 3D!Turbo2000. This little utility basically gives a slight cosmetic change to the original drivers, while adding a few more options. Not particularly useful - but hey, at least you aren't stuck paying for a bunch of worthless titles. As long as the price reflects the lack of a decent bundle, we aren't complaining.

815 Pro front

Overclocking

We weren't expecting too much to happen when we tried to overclock this video card. Well actually much did happen, just not much in terms of overclocking. The 5.5ns RAM chips on the card we had for review purposes didn't exactly leave too much headroom for experimenting. We have been told by MSI that the mass production runs of the card will include 5 ns RAM chips, so your overclocking attempts will probably be much better than ours. As we have learned over the last few months, overclocking the core doesn't help too much when it comes to squeezing out a few more frames.

As we proved in our GeForce overclocking articles, high core speeds did not equate to higher frame rates. Currently NVIDIA cores are like Formula 1 engines. You have this massive 400 or 500 HP engine paired with a two-gallon gas tank. Throwing in a bigger engine isn't going to solve your problem. Faster memory, or a bigger gas tank, is the key to getting more frames with this card.

815 Pro back

So what were the results of our overclocking tests? We can't really be too sure. The BIOS version on the card we had for review was incorrectly reporting speeds. If we assume that the error was linear in nature, then we can simply subtract a few numbers to see how much we overclocked the card by. Doing that, we successfully pushed the core and memory up another 20 MHz without any problems. Otherwise, we have no clue what the card reached.

Specs

You might be wondering why the list of specs is so short for this card. It isn't. The cards manufactured these days follow reference design to a T. So that means that every other card is pretty much the same as this one. The only real difference this card has from others is the addition of a TV-out. In case you were looking for a list of specs for the GeForce2, take a look at one of our other reviews.