: News
: Reviews
: Editorials

: Archives
: About
: Contact
: Advertising
: Privacy
: Links
: Forums

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT

Revitalizing the Midrange

by Josh Walrath

Overclocking with nTune

            While the board I have is a reference sample, I decided to do some light overclocking with it.  I used the latest version of nTune, which gives a user control over the core and memory speeds.  It does not at this time have the option of clocking the shader core separately.  The latest version does lock the ratio between core and shader clocks, so when the core is overclocked, the shaders are as well.  Earlier overclocking software did not touch the shader clocks.  Products such as Rivatuner do allow the individual clocking of the shader core.

            There has been some talk about how fragile the G92 core is to overclocking, especially considering the cooling on the chip.  An overclocked chip can reach over 100C under load, and the heatsink and fan cannot keep up very well.  I did take my sample up to a 656 MHz core, 1640 MHz shader, and 1000 MHz memory.  This gave a nice little boost to performance overall, but likely the card can go even faster than what I was willing to push it.

The 8800 GT (bottom) is fairly dwarfed by the older and larger (like me) 8800 GTX.  Yes... that little fan does an adequate job of cooling the card.

System Setup

            I wanted to use a system that would not be holding these cards back for testing.  As such I am using a slightly overclocked Intel Core 2 Duo X6800.  I am also using an overclocked out of the box XFX 8800 GTX as the comparison.  The Intel based machine is using the NVIDIA nForce 680i chipset, and as such it does not utilize PCI-E Gen 2.  I ran the 8800 GT on a separate AMD 790FX based motherboard, but due to the speed of the processor, I did all of my benchmarking on the Intel machine.  The card worked with no problems on the AMD machine, and PCI-E Gen 2 support seemed to work flawlessly.

NVIDIA Reference 8800 GT at stock clocks

XFX 8800 GTX XXX

Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 @ 3.2 GHz

XFX 680i Motherboard running at 1600 MHz FSB

2 x 1 GB Super Talent DDR-2 800 memory at 4:4:3:8 latencies

Seagate 7200.10 320 GB Hard Drive

Lite-on DVD-R/RW Drive

Floppy Disk Drive

Windows Vista 64 Ultimate

ForceWare 169.09

            The Vista install utilized all of the hotfixes available at this time to improve compatibility, reliability, and performance.

            The XFX 8800 GTX has a core clock of 630 MHz, a shader clock of 1350MHz, and the memory running at a full 1000 MHz (2 GHz effective).  This is significantly faster than a stock clocked GTX, and is closer to the Ultra in overall speed.  The only part that is not up to Ultra specifications is the shader clock.

            I wanted to get this review out a lot sooner, but NVIDIA continually updated the 169 series of drivers weekly it seemed.  The 169.09 drivers are essentially the same as the current 169.12 drivers, except the latest drivers fix a hibernation issue with the 8800 GT.

            A big thanks to Ryan Dumas of XFX for the use of the XFX 8800 GTX XXX and XFX 680i motherboard, Brian Burke of NVIDIA for the 8800 GT, Dan Snyder of Intel for the C2D X6800, and Joe James of Super Talent for the DDR-2 memory

Results

3D Mark 2005

            This old stalwart is a good measure of cards from the same family or architecture.  It does stress a current card much like a game that came from 2004 and 2005 would.

            These results show the two cards neck and neck, and obviously 3D 2005 is not really pushing either of them that much.  Then again, the benchmark was run at standard settings, which is 1024 x 768.  At this point the CPU is holding them back.

Next:  More Results

Copyright 1999-2007 PenStar Systems, LLC.