When you open the box, here's what you'll find inside:
It's meant to be an inexpensive card, and as is often
the case, there are no game packins. Of course, my opinion of packin games is
rather low. SE/LE/Demo versions of games are often what you get, and they're not
worth worrying about IMHO. The Driver CD is a generic affair, with drivers for
many of MSI's video products. Nvidia drivers included are 5.32 Detonators. For
consistent benchmarks with the video card I pit it against, I decided to forgo
the driver's on CD, and installed Nvidia's Official Detonator3's. (6.31).
The card itself is fairly basic, and deviates little
from NVIDIA's reference designs. This is pretty much the norm these days with
Nvidia cards, and there's nothing wrong with Nvidia's reference design. A
passive heatsink is provided on the GPU, which will limint your overclocking
options, at least initially. At the very least MSI was smart enough to include a
wee dab of heatsink compound, under the removeable heatsink, so the adventurous
among you can go and slap something more appropriate on it for overclocking. The
Nvidia Detonator control panel is a familiar site to me, with my Hercules
Prophet3D Geforce DDR, but here's something new.
Twinview, is Nvidia's attempt at countering the feature
set of the Matrox G4xx cards with Dualhead technology, which are quite popular
in the corporate and general graphics market. In the case of the MSI Starforce
816, the Twinview feature is implemented in it's TV-Out interface, driven by a
Conexant BT869 chipset. From the control panel you see that you have a couple of
choices, either cloning your current desktop to the 2nd TV display, or using
your TV as an extended desktop. Certainly the cloning feature will be very handy
for gaming on a TV, and avoids problems many TV-Out enabled cards have had in
the past, by supporting only one display at a time, VGA or TV, which can make
switching back and forth between them somewhat awkward.
The Twinview feature is not as mature as the Matrox's
Dualhead technology, and some snags still exist with program's that use
DirectDraw overlay surfaces (Windows Media Player, DVD software, ect)on the
secondary display, when in extended desktop mode. I had the typical problems
encountered with OpenGL games with a secondary display enabled in extended
desktop mode (a limitation of Window's OpenGL subsystem not allowing more than 1
active DirectDraw surface) but things were just fine in "clone" mode, and this
will be the mode most useful anyway with a TV based output. Also using MSI-DVD
(based on PowerDVD v2.55) there were no problems in clone mode. Overall, the
TV-Out quality (max resolution of 800x600) was quite satisfying. The Geforce2MX
includes MPEG2 hardware motion compensation, as just about every chipset made
does these days, and on the systems I tested (Celeron 600, Celeron 1008, P3
1001) I had more than enough horsepower to playback DVD with or without the
aforementioned feature. DVD playback quality was typical of PowerDVD, which is
good, and is the DVD player I use and recommend.
The Geforce2MX is essentially the Geforce2 core, with a
de-hanced memory interface. While the Geforce/Geforce2 support a 128bit memory
interface, the Geforce2MX supports a 64bit memory interface. Where and when will
this matter, is what we'll answer next, in my benchmark extravaganza! ;)
Before you read on, keep in mind that due to time
constraints (review backlog, and a need to return MSI's video card to them) I
did limit my benchmarking runs, and ran both the MSI Starforce 816, and the card
I compared it with (my personal Hercules Geforce DDR) at default control panel
settings, including default clockrates.
Next page: How does it perform?
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