The first thing I thought when I saw the MSI StarForce 822 was "Damn, this card looks sweet!" Of course the Starforce 822 boasts the mighty nVidia GeForce 3 GPU, which in itself is enough to leave me in awe.

What makes this card stand out from other GeForce 3 offerings is the presence of a daughter card with TV-IN/TV-Out and S-Video out. Odly the MSI Starforce 822 came out of the box lacking memory heatsinks. Never one to leave things alone, I probably would have removed the stock memory heatsinks and added my very own anyway. MSI saved me quite a bit of trouble by leaving the memory heatsinks off of the card. Nevertheless, I was still called "crazy" for adding ramsinks to my GeForce 3 - thus voiding the warranty to a $600CDN videocard. But what the heck, you only live once right?

The Starforce 822 uses 3.8ns memory made by Elite Semiconductor. Rumor has it that there are early retail versions of GeForce 3 cards coming equipped with slower 4 ns memory. Whether that's true or not, I'm glad mine has 3.8 ns RAM. So what's the "beef" anyway? Well, theoretically the 3.8 ns Elite RAM should be able to clock to a higher frequency because you see; 1000/4*2 = 500 MHz (4ns RAM) while 1000/3.8*2 = 526 MHz (3.8ns). Under ideal conditions, the faster memory modules should have a higher frequency ceiling.

Another rumor circulating around the tech world is that some early versions of GeForce 3 based video cards are being sold with an older A3 stepping GPU. Thankfully, the card I have uses a GPU with an A5 core. What's the big deal between the A3 and A5 stepping? The differences between the stepping numbers relate to what iteration the GPU is. Essentially the A5 GPU should eliminate some possible incompatibilities, but more importantly (to me anyway) allow the card to be overclocked higher.