The MS-8809 follows the NVidia reference design very closely. Our board featured a TV out connector in the form of S-Video out along with the corresponding cable.
We ran into a few issues when we installed the MS-8809 into one of our test systems which was previously occupied with a 3dfx Voodoo 3 board. Since we didn't delete the voodoo 3 board from the "device manager" we had a few problems getting the system to recognize the GeForce drivers. After a Windows quick "reinstallation" everything worked out.
Performance
Test System Configuration
Processor Intel Pentium III @ 880 Mhz Memory 128 Megs PC-133 SDRAM Hard Disk Drive Western Digital Expert 18.1 Gig Video Card MicroStar MS-8809 GeForce SDR Operating System Windows 98 Second Edition
As you can see from the above chart, the performance of the GeForce is still very respectable at all resolutions. I was expecting a bit higher performance than the above numbers especially when we are talking about a Pentium III @ 880 MHz. The numbers were very close at to the Athlon 750 MHz that we had tested earlier. I guess a GeForce 2 would be in order for the next level of performance. Let's also take a look at some 3D Mark 2000 numbers...
3D Mark 2000 shows us exactly the same thing as Quake III. There's definitely a shark drop in performance once you switch into 32-bit color mode.
OverClocking
As we mentioned earlier the MS-8809 came outfitted with
5.5ns RAM, and it allowed us to overclock the memory to 190 MHz. We were also
able to overclock the core at 160 MHz. The difference in performance between
overclocked and non-overclocked states was minimal and therefore we didn't deem
it necessary to include those results. But, if you are looking for the absolute
last bit of juice out of this card, then you may find it beneficial to overclock
it.
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