Monday, November 06, 2000

The drivers

At the time of this writing, several drivers were available for this card. The v6.18 drivers, for instance, were reputed to be afflicted by several serious bugs that affected memory systems based on the VIA KX133, and KT133 chipsets. V6.27 made a brief appearance on the scene, but was itself quickly retired, but not before we noted a net improvement in stability over v6.18. Next came 6.31 which was officially released by Nvidia, and 6.35, which is not officially supported at all. For our tests, we chose to use 2 pairs of drivers for comparison: v5.16 which were included on the installation CD, and v6.18, Nvidia's reference drivers.

Overclocking

The Starforce 815 card that we received from MSI for testing came with 32MB of DDR memory clocked at 166MHz (333MHz effective). The GPU itself is set to oscillate at 200MHz. Below, you can see an image of the v5.16 drivers, which were included on the installation CD supplied by Micro-Star, and to which they added their own little Overclocking utility.

By using the v5.16 drivers & the MSI Overclocking utility, we were able to push the memory on our card to an effective frequency of 410MHz, and our GPU to 220MHz - thus netting us a 4.8% increase in performance.

The software bundle

The StarForce 815 came with only a bit of software: video drivers, DirectX 7, and MSI 3D Turbo - which is a graphics configuration utility.

Next: The test setup.