Specs/Overclocking

Hardware

Hardware-wise there isn't much to talk about with the StarForce 822. Almost all the NVIDIA-based cards coming out these days utilize the NVIDIA reference design. Scratch out one name for another, and that's about as much product differentiation you actually get. The MSI card does come with quite a few outputs though. There is an S-Video output and an RCA video-in for the video-editing crowd.

Software

The bundle MSI has chosen for the StarForce 822 is pretty much average. You have your NVIDA drivers with MSI branding, the ubiquitous DVD player software, and some other less common stuff. To help on the video-editing side, you also get Ulead Video Studio Basic SE 4.0. I think the current version of this is 5.0, we're not sure as to how much of a change the software has undertaken, but this definitely isn't the newest version. Topping off the bundle is a game called Dronez, one of the few GeForce3 enabled games out on the market at the moment.

The one handy feature the MSI drivers provide is a quick means to overclocking. We all know that these features are hidden in the official 12.41 drivers from NVIDIA. With previous driver releases you had to edit your Windows registry to unlock the overclocking menu. NVIDIA's newer drivers removed this feature, but they can be re-enabled by replacing one of the newer files with a file from one of the older driver sets. With the MSI Turbo utility, the overclocking options are all available from the start without any hassles. The utility isn't any different from the NVIDIA version, just easier to access.

Overclocking utility

Overclocking

What overclocking? We decided not to run any overclocking tests on this particular card because it wouldn't really be representative of what similar cards would be capable of. Actually that previous statement is a bit bad. To assume that our overclocking results could be considered the norm is inherently wrong as our board utilizes a less capable cooling solution than the final StarForce 822 cards shipping at retail.