My EVGA 8800GS review with benches and pictures

AzN

Banned
Nov 26, 2001
4,112
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http://www.snapdrive.net/files/56830/8800gs.jpg


EVGA 8800GS
PCI-E 2.0 x16
Core Clock:550 MHz
Shader Clock:1375 MHz
Memory Clock:800 MHz (1600 DDR)
Memory Bandwidth:38.4 GB/sec
Pixel Fillrate:6600 MPixels/sec
Texture Fillrate:26400 MTexels/sec

Test System:
E6300 @ 3.05 ghz on a Scythe Mine with custom 120mm fan for 800/1200/1600rpm
Asus P5B vanilla
2 gigs @ 870 mhz 5-5-5-15 timing
Onboard Soundmax audio
Samsung 250gig
Hitachi 160 gig
19? Viewsonic VA1912WB
Antec Sonata 2 with SP 2.0 450watt
Vista x86 ultimate
Nvidia 174.74

All tests are done at 1440x900 otherwise noted.

Tested:
3dmark
Crysis 1.2
World in Conflict
Need 4 Speed Prostreet




http://www.snapdrive.net/files/56830/3dmark.jpg

http://www.snapdrive.net/files...0/pixel%20fillrate.jpg

As you can see, pixel fillrate does hold back by memory bandwidth to a certain extent but core clock speed increases does more than memory bandwidth alone.


http://www.snapdrive.net/files...texture%20fillrate.jpg

Texture fillrate doesn?t get affected by memory bandwidth. Notice 8600gts texture fillrate is rather low for a card with a theoretical fillrate of 11200 MTexels/s @ clock speed of 700mhz. G92 has improved its texture throughput over G84 by 20+ percent.



http://www.snapdrive.net/files/56830/SM3.jpg


http://www.snapdrive.net/files/56830/crysis%20cover.jpg

http://www.snapdrive.net/files/56830/Crysis.jpg

Benchmark was done with GPU portion of in game crysis benchmark. The new 174.74 drivers gave me substantial increase in FPS over the drivers CD, nearly 3fps in high settings. CD was using older 169 set of drivers. I would say it performs very close to 8800gt at those frame rates especially dx9 high settings.

I was able to play Dx9 high settings near smoothness. It does dip to high teens in Ice Level and the Deck however it was much more enjoyable. I was able to turn up shader to very high with minimal impact in fps. Post processing at very high in the other hand dropped my fps by 60+%. It might have something to do with 8800gs 384mb vram.



http://www.snapdrive.net/files/56830/WIC%20cover.jpg

http://www.snapdrive.net/files/56830/WIC.jpg

Dx10 high settings were using 2xAA and Dx10 highest uses 4xAA by default. Biggest problem with 8800gs with WIC is the 384mb vram that hampers AA performance. Biggest gains from the overclock were @ dx10 highest without AA.



http://www.snapdrive.net/files/56830/NFS.jpg

http://www.snapdrive.net/files/56830/NFS%20BMW.jpg
My custom BMW M3 E46 was used for this benchmark.

http://www.snapdrive.net/files/56830/Prostreet.jpg

The game was tested with fraps using Autobahn GP gripclass track. It?s a 3 lap course. This game seems to love shader. Notice the substantial gain again from the overclock once again. At 8xAA I was able to get nearly 20 more fps over the 8600gts.




Conclusions:

What compelled me to buy this card over the 9600gt was that it has 96SP and more texture fillrate and it was cheaper. I?m on a 19? LCD monitor where memory bandwidth isn?t really an issue but longevity of the card. I do think that as more game use more shader 8800gs will surpass 9600gt in raw performance. Currently these cards are about equal in terms of raw performance. 8800gs wins some and 9600gt win some. At those overclocks however I?m convinced 8800gs does take the cake in medium resolutions where memory capacity or memory bandwidth isn?t an issue. 9600gt however will always do better with AA in higher resolutions because of bigger memory module and memory bandwidth. At 1044mhz/2088DDR it?s not exactly slow either. That?s 50.2GB/s where stock 9600gt is 57.6GB/s.

The card was very quiet. At 700rpm in windows it wasn?t even audible to my ear. My case doesn?t exactly have lot of airflow with only 1 800rpm case fan and the size of this card made my cpu temperature rise by 5C. The temperature reached 80C with the overclock which I edited the bios to make the card fans to be more aggressive to 55% when gaming. It sits at 76C on load. At 55% fan speed it?s only a slight hum to my ear.

With a huge overclock it gained as much as 30% more fps. Hopefully you gained some important information from this review.




Pros: Cheap price, Excellent performance per $$$, highly overclockable, quiet heatsink fan, 96 Stream processors, 1ns memory, life time warranty

Cons: Limited quantity, 384mb vram, huge size which can block airflow if you have a medium size case
 

MustangSVT

Lifer
Oct 7, 2000
11,554
12
81
damn oc to 702/1044!!! mine only at 710/990.. I want it to break 1k but it just isnt stable 0-_-0 but I should be happy that I am able to do that with a xfx card. and now with accelero s1 its silent !
 

njdevilsfan87

Platinum Member
Apr 19, 2007
2,341
264
126
Nice review... we don't see enough of these. It's almost as if the 8800GS doesn't exist. I have a 9600GT on the way. I initially had the same questions as you when it came to 8800GS vs 9600GT. However, I use 1680x1050, and I wasn't sure if 384MB/192-bit bus was going to cut it at that resolution with AA, so I just played it safe and went with the slightly more expensive 9600GT. Hopefully it was the right choice. I remember back when I had a 256mb x1900xt which ran great while AA was disabled, but once the memory limitation kicked in (and this happened when I began to apply AA)... things just really, really began to suck. I don't ever want that to happen again.
 

AzN

Banned
Nov 26, 2001
4,112
2
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Exactly there are so many 9600gt reviews but not 8800gs. I thought this was much needed.
 

hans007

Lifer
Feb 1, 2000
20,212
18
81
Originally posted by: Azn
Exactly there are so many 9600gt reviews but not 8800gs. I thought this was much needed.

i guess it is more because the 8800gs was more of a stopgap. i don tthink anyone is even making the cards now, so the cheap prices o nit now are probably just to clear it out.
 

AzN

Banned
Nov 26, 2001
4,112
2
0
Originally posted by: MustangSVT
damn oc to 702/1044!!! mine only at 710/990.. I want it to break 1k but it just isnt stable 0-_-0 but I should be happy that I am able to do that with a xfx card. and now with accelero s1 its silent !

That's not bad for 1.4 ns ram on your xfx.
 

AzN

Banned
Nov 26, 2001
4,112
2
0
Originally posted by: hans007
Originally posted by: Azn
Exactly there are so many 9600gt reviews but not 8800gs. I thought this was much needed.

i guess it is more because the 8800gs was more of a stopgap. i don tthink anyone is even making the cards now, so the cheap prices o nit now are probably just to clear it out.

Yeah it's suppsed to 150k cards around the globe. It would dry up quickly at these prices.
 

AzN

Banned
Nov 26, 2001
4,112
2
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I messed with the clocks.


702/1782/1064


It seems my core will not go any higher without seeing a tiny yellow spec flicking on and off. All on stock cooling tested throughly.


Let's compare with a stock 8800gt.


8800gt
Core Clock: 600 MHz
Shader Clock: 1500 MHz
Memory Clock: 900 MHz (1800 DDR)
Memory Bandwidth: 57.6 GB/sec
FLOPS: 168000 GFLOPS
Pixel Fill Rate: 9600 MPixels/sec
Texture Fill Rate: 33600 MTexels/sec


EVGA 8800gs overclocked
Core Clock: 702 MHz
Shader Clock: 1782 MHz
Memory Clock: 1064 MHz (2128 DDR)
Memory Bandwidth: 51.1 GB/sec
FLOPS: 171000 GFLOPS
Pixel Fill Rate: 8424 MPixels/sec
Texture Fill Rate: 33696 MTexels/sec