Introduction

Ride the wave

Get ready folks, the wave of GeForce3 reviews is coming. Sure we're a little late to jump on, but we're easily going to make up for it in the coming weeks. This weeks GeForce3 installment starts with the MSI Starforce 822.

MSI, or MicroStar International - we've been reviewing their motherboards for some time now. So far, we've only reviewed one of their video cards. From the looks of it, they seem to be building a habit of sending pre-production cards. Our first experience with MSI cards started with the GeForce2 Pro. That pre-production card had an unusual bug that reported that the card was running at slower speeds. Our version of the Pro card also arrived with 5.5ns chips, instead of the standard 5ns that is present on all Pro cards.

Our 822

The good part of the story is that the end user never sees these issues. Only a handful of other sites, and us, will ever see them. Occasionally it makes the reviewing of the card a little harder, as we expect to have something that the end user would play with.

Yay!

This time around, the issues were quite a bit milder. Nothing was wrong with the RAM; in fact, it was the fact that we could see the RAM at all that was a bit startling. Our pre-production board came with no heatsinks for the RAM. Surprisingly, this didn't have much of an effect on the normal performance of the card. The picture you see that has the heatsinks is going to be the retail card; the other picture is of the card we got for review.

The real 822!

The following page of the review will consist of the 822's features. Should you actually want to know more about the GeForce3 chipset itself, feel free to check out James' article. Retyping what he said earlier doesn't quite fit into my idea of fun.