LOSTCIRCUITS

However, there are still the issues of drivers and utilities. The original version of the drivers included on the installation CD is built around the 3.68 nVidia reference drivers, including all pros and cons as good image quality and performance a little bit on the slow side. Updating to the 5.16 (beta) drivers, reverses the situation by favoring frame rates over image quality. Unfortunately, installation of the 5.16 drivers eliminates the possibility to disable vsync in Direct3D applications. More unfortunately, Powerstrip cannot be used either since the NOVSYNC = 0000001 dword written to the registry is not valid with the detonator drivers.

MSI has included their 3D!-TurboII utility with the Phantom driver CD. In short, 3D Turbo includes MSI’s own version of Powerstrip to change the clock speed of both engine and memory. Alas, the GeForce is not listed among the devices supported by the utility and neither does it work. The same holds for basically all other utilities except for the Virtual-desktop so that installation of the 3D!-TurboII packet just adds unnecessary ballast and is not recommended

Included with the Phantom are further the MSI soft-DVD drivers which work sufficiently well, albeit with relatively high CPU usage.

Quality

If the aforementioned is true, that is, higher quality components can be judged by their capability for overclocking, the MS 8809 certainly doesn’t need to hide behind any competition. That is, up to 155 / 195 MHz core / memory frequency, there were no problems whatsoever, at 160 / 200 MHz settings, occasional triangle flashes occurred in 3Dmark 2000, whereas all other applications ran flawlessly. All of this was accomplished without extra cooling at about 28-30 centigrade room temperature.

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