The MSI Starforce 816 is MSI’s 5th video card. MSI have not had a reputation for jumping onto the graphics bandwagon but like so may other motherboard manufacturers they have started to dabble in the graphics industry. MSI’s first attempt in the Graphics market was the value segment with the 8807 based on the RIVA TNT2 M64 chipset with 16MB SDRAM. As with all TNT2 M64 cards it was not a very good performer, this was nothing to do with MSI but rather the TNT2 M64 as its cut down memory and data bus hindered the real power of the chip. After that MSI decided to release a newer revision based on the TNT2M64 offering 32MB of SDRAM, this did improve the performance but once again not much. MSI then moved into the shadows until the release of the Geforce chipset. MSI released the 8809 with 32MB DDRSDRAM which turned out to be quite a performer. When the GeForce2 GTS arrived, MSI once again threw caution to the wind and released the Starforce and again this card proved to be a success for MSI. Today, we are very lucky to have the privilege of testing MSI’s latest offering to the value market the Starforce 816, will this be another success for MSI? Lets see, first lets take a look as the specifications of the card.
Features
- Optimised for Direct3D acceleration with complete support for Microsoft DirectX - 256-bit 2D and 3D graphics accelerator - 350MHz Palette-DAC - 128-bit Memory Interface - 32 MB SDRAM - Digital Dual Display Architecture - Integrated Dual 135MHz LVDS/TMDS Transmitter - nVIDIA Shading Rasteriser - 4 Texels per Clock - Integrated second-generation transform and lighting engine - 32-bit colour with 32-bit Z/stencil - Cube Environment mapping - DirectX and S3TC texture compression - 700 Mtexel fill rate - 20Mtriangels/sec setup - 2.9GB/second memory bandwidth - AGP 4x fast writes - Supports up to 4 display interface-CRT, TV and Digital Panel Interface
High Quality Video Playback
- DVD and HDTV ready motion compensation for MPEG-2 decoding - Supports for VIP 2.0 interface
Full Software Support For
- Windows(R) 95 and 98 Display Drivers - Windows(R) 2000, Windows(R) NT 4.0 Display Drivers - OpenGL ICD for Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0, and Windows 95 and 98 - Linux
