LOSTCIRCUITS

The most successful graphics adapter concept for gaming computers during the past 6 months has been the nVidia GeForce. The predominant reason for its success is not only the overwhelming performance of the graphics engine but rather the concept of licensing the design to anyone willing and able of manufacturing graphics cards and selling them under their own brand name.

From an engineering standpoint, the implementation of the reference design is not too difficult. In addition, nVidia releases new drivers almost on a biweekly basis, making software support by the manufacturer almost irrelevant. This basically leaves the task of picking the most stable reference drivers to be included into the shipping version of the video card, regardless of how up-to-date they may be and leave it to the end user to keep up with the latest driver updates to increase the performance.

In summary, the drivers / control panel become a uniform feature for all GeForce spawns and, moreover, almost all cards follow the same reference design. Yet, there are different brands of GeForce-based video cards available with sometimes substantial price deltas, leaving the question whether the differences warrant the price increase. One needs to bear in mind, though, that there is more to a video card than just the graphics chip and the reference design, just like a mainboard is not just the chipset and a piece of PCB.

For performance issues, the most crucial issues are that even the slowest GeForce has more power than even a mid-class system can handle. In high-end gaming machines, arbitrarily defined here as anything running above 600 MHz, other considerations need to be taken into account since keeping up with the overall system performance is no longer a given. Briefly, the performance limit of the graphics card is set by the pixel output per clock cycle and, by extension, the engine and memory clock speed. Both, within reason, are a factor of quality of the chips used. In other words, the more stringent the speed grade requirements are applied, the higher are chances that the card will actually tolerate higher speed settings. On the downside, the lower yields of upper grade components necessarily result in higher price tags which need to be handed down to the consumer to ensure profitability. All in all, it is at the discretion of the manufacturer to find a nitch within a tight market and most of the time you get what you pay for. Enter MSI in the picture. Based on quality, innovation and performance, MSI consistently ranks within the top tier of mainboard manufacturers, so, how good are their lesser known video cards?

The MS-8809 or Phantom GeForce had been announced already several months ago but, until now, some debugging problems have delayed its release. Since the GeForce is already in the process of being replaced with its NV15 based GeForce2 successor, it does appear as if MSI enters the GeForce market at the very last moment of the window of opportunity for successful marketing. On the other hand, the latest is not always the greatest and good products have always sold. Moreover, the experience gathered with developing the Phantom can be credited towards the expertise necessary for the next generation board which is already under development in form of the GeForce2.

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