1. Features
Nvidia
has been introducing affordable products for medium range users for
sometime now. The GS and GT series represent the vision of Nvidia towards
good performance and a price that will please most users. Recently,
Nvidia introduced its latest creation, the 8800GT series, which
promises to rock your gaming world. The GeForce 8800 GT was announced
on October 29th by Nvidia as an answer to enthusiast
gamers demands for high-performance graphics.
The recently released DirectX10 games Crysis, Hellgate: London, and Gears of War really need a powerful GPU, which Nvidia now offers at the $199 - $259
price range. The new 8800GT series include 112 stream processors and a
256-bit frame buffer interface running at 900MHz, while Nvidia has
revised the PureVideo HD engine that promises even better
Blu-ray and HD-DVD movie picture quality than the previous
generation.
Lastly, it is PCI Express 2.0 bus architecture certified, even though not
many motherboards on the market currently support this new interface.
Below is a table that illustrates the major features of the various
8800 models in terms of core/shader/memory clocks and interface bandwidth.
|
Core Clock (MHz) |
Shader Clock (MHz) |
Memory Clock (MHz) |
Memory Amount |
Memory Interface |
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) |
Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec) |
GeForce
8800 Ultra |
612 |
1500 |
1080 |
768MB |
384-bit |
103.7 |
39.2 |
GeForce
8800 GTX |
575 |
1350 |
900 |
768MB |
384-bit |
86.4 |
36.8 |
GeForce
8800 GT |
600 |
1500 |
900 |
512MB |
256-bit |
57.6 |
33.6 |
GeForce
8800 GTS |
500 |
1200 |
800 |
640MB or
320MB |
320-bit |
64 |
24 |
GeForce
8600 GTS |
675 |
1450 |
1000 |
256MB |
128-bit |
32 |
10.8 |
GeForce
8600 GT |
540 |
1190 |
700 |
256MB |
128-bit |
22.4 |
8.64 |
GeForce
8500 GT |
450 |
900 |
400 |
256MB |
128-bit |
12.8 |
3.6 |
GeForce
8400 GS |
450 |
900 |
400 |
256MB |
64-bit |
6.4 |
3.6 |
The GeForce 8800GT comes with a blazing 600MHz core, 1500MHz shader
and 900MHz memory clocks that place it above the 8800GTS series. Moreover,
it has 512MB of on-board memory with 256 bits of bandwidth.
The test results should be very interesting, especially since for
the first time, Nvidia releases a low priced product with high
performance. At this point, we have in our labs two graphics cards
based on Nvidia's 8800GT, clocked at higher speeds, and of course
higher performance.
The Inno3D 8800GT and XFX 8800GT, both OC editions. First, let's meet the Inno3D
8800GT OC edition.