The NVIDIA GeForce chip, not exactly the kind of component that needs much of an introduction nowadays. In fact, it’s not a big surprise to see how bigger motherboard manufacturers have been jumping on the video card bandwagon lately.

We can say ABIT and Gigabyte are two big names that are new to the market and have already got a partnership with NVIDIA. MSI Computer is another of the new companies to appear with a GeForce card; the 8809 is a SDRAM based GeForce card which we will be testing here.

Although it’s clear that the card is late to the market you must take in consideration that with GeForce 2 cards available already, Geforces can be bought for much less money than before, making it an excellent choice for a low-end gaming system.

Installation & Drivers

As we all know the NVIDIA GeForce chip is very power consuming so getting it working with my Athlon/Slot A system was a problem at first but after installing a new massive 425w ATX power supply I stopped having those problems as expected. So, other than that I didn’t have problems with the installation of the card, I took out the ASUS V6600 card I had on my AGP slot and popped in the MSI card.

After that I booted up and installed the MSI drivers that came in the box CD just to see what was new on them. I wasn’t surprised to see that they looked almost exactly like NVIDIA reference drivers. I went to MSI website to see what were the newer drivers but for some reason I couldn’t get them to install properly so for testing I preferred to use the latest reference drivers version 5.22 that are available on NVIDIA’s website.

As I said, MSI drivers had nothing special but where you could actually see the MSI touch was in the extra utility they ship with the card called “3D! Turbo II”, there you have the usual tweaking setting including virtual desktop options, monitor adjustments and core/memory speed control for overclocking.

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