The MSI Starforce 822 is the second GeForce 3 graphics card to ever arrive at our lab. We might have enjoyed reviewing more graphic cards earlier, but, due to the fact that we had specialized primarily in motherboard reviews up until that point, we just couldn't gain access to graphic cards for reviewing as easily as we did with motherboards. It seems that we still need to work on our reputation in the graphics card arena a little longer before to finally receive more graphic cards for reviewing. Whatever the case though, we're quite happy to now have MSI's Starforce 822 on hand, and have the opportunity to put it through the paces.

Since we've previously written a review of the technology behind the GeForce3, and the NV20 chipset, we'll be skipping over those details this time around. If you need an overview of the GF3, we invite you to click on the link.

In this article, we'll be concentrating on comparing the MSI Starforce 822 to the Visiontek GeForce3 that we reviewed earlier on. We'll also be testing various drivers for the Starforce 822, in order to determine what, if any, performance advantage one may have over another.

Finally, we'll also put it through several Overclocking tests, in order to see just how far this graphic card can be pushed.

For the record, the Starforce 822 is composed primarily of an NV20 vA05 chipset clocked at 200MHz, a 350MHz RAMDAC, and a set of EliteMT 3.8ns memory chips.