A conventional MIMO system is designed consisting of 4 antenna elements at both the receiver and transmitter ends. Different kinds of signal detection techniques, namely, zero forcing (ZF), minimum mean square error (MMSE) and beamforming (BF), are used at the receiver end for signal detection. The performance of the system is analyzed by calculating BER vs SNR for each of the above techniques separately. The present work has been thoroughly analyzed and implemented using MATLAB. On the basis of the results obtained, it is summarized that as the values of SNR increase, BER decreases for ZF and MMSE and it almost vanishes to zero even for low SNR values if BF is used. Although ZF and MMSE are suitable for designing a conventional MIMO system with 4 antenna elements, it becomes too difficult for a large number of antenna elements due to its complexity of calculating the inverse of a (