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What about this video card?

As I mentioned earlier, MSI was also kind enough to include one of their new video card products for me to play with. The MS-Star Force 815 is based on the Nvidia GeForce2 GTS chip. The GTS is currently the hottest thing going (in it's various forms) and I was anxious to try it out in a dual processor machine.

I won't bother to rehash all of the specifications. I'm sure you have seen the reviews of cards based on this chipset all over the net already, so I won't beat a dead horse here. This card is as reference as reference gets. In fact, the BIOS of this 32mb GTS card even says "Nvidia GeForce2 GTS BIOS: Not for retail use" when the machine boots. This is not a bad thing at all however, as most people (especially Win2k users) use Nvidia's own reference drivers anyway. The card does come with a decent software bundle which includes, among other things, a software DVD player. It may not be the most full featured GTS on the market, but I am sure it will be priced accordingly for a 32mb GTS. [Although I didn't find the card listed on Pricewatch at the time of this writing, the preliminary pricing that MSI gave me makes the card very competitive - Ed.]

Installation was a breezewith only a few exceptions. Plug it in, load the drivers and voila! Instant gaming goodness! But how would it stand up to some serious professional level work? After all, we can't play games all the time. I couldn't get AGP 4x working reliably, but I am not sure if that is the fault of the motherboard or video card. I wasn't too concerned however, as AGP 4x is just hype at the moment and doesn't show any *real* benefits.

The test system:

I also applied Windows2000 Service Pack 1, the very latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers (version 4.24), latest VIA sound drivers (for onboard sound), and the Detonator3 v6.18 drivers from Nvidia.

I really wanted to get a good mix of benchmarks in this review. Other than our now standard SiSoft Sandra 2000 scores, I really wanted to show what the system (motherboard and video card) as a whole could accomplish. I also wanted to be sure that you could replicate these tests at home (or at work) as well. After all, what good are the numbers if you have nothing to compare them to?

After a lot of thought and discussion by myself and the other guys here at 2CPU.com, we settled on a suite of benchmarks that we thought would give a good overall picture of the system in question. We also think that the numbers are very pertinent to most of you as well. Games are great, but let's face it, we don't build these monster workstations just to play games.

For the first round of numbers, we are sticking with SiSoft Sandra 2000. This is quickly becoming a benchmarking standard and it gives us a very accurate picture of how our whole machine (CPU, memory, etc) is stacking up.

For the video card aspect of things, it started getting a bit hairy, but we finally made a choice. We decided that in order to give a well rounded picture of the video subsystem, we would include AutoCAD2000, SPEC Viewperf, 3DMark2000 v1.1, and of course, Quake3 Arena. This will give us an idea what the card and/or machine can do in a variety of the applications that dual processor machines are geared for (And a few games too :-). No, not all the applications we use are multi-threaded, but hey... That's life.