Barely a month had passed after the introduction of new price performance King of mid-budget card HD2900Pro, we have a new card in same price range that Nvidia rolled out.
In the volatile GPU market there is a new addition at a time when there are some big game titles launching in this month.
So lets have a look at the shiny new offering from Nvidia this time around, the newly launched Nvidia 8800GT 512MB.
The card that will be reviewed here is eVGA 8800GT KO edition. This comes factory overclocked to 675Mhz core and 1950Mhz memory.
The standard 8800GT speeds are 600/1800.
This review will be somewhat different than all others you see on the internet. It wont be run on your daily plain jane pc. The test setup will be something that will show how these cards perform when CPU and memory bottleneck is done away with and I will only concentrate at high resolution gaming. With the increasing popularity of 20 and 22 inch screens 1680x1050 has become popular choice for gamers and many other will be thinking of switching to these LCDs but dont exactly know how these cards will perform at this resolution. Not many reviews concentrate at this resolution for reason which i fail to understand.
Anyway lets begin.
[BREAK=eVGA 8800GT KO 512MB]
eVGA 8800GT KO 512MB
This particular card was imported from USA. But similar offerings are available in India.
8800GT is a die shrink of Geforce 8800 series. This is the new 65nm version of the 8800 series. So whats changed?
This card comes with 112 steam processors which is more than 8800GTS. And this card gets VP2 video processing unit that was previously found only in 8600/8400 series.
The memory bus is now 256bit which is inferior to the 8800GTS 320bit interface.
The clock speed on NVIDIA reference card is 600Mhz core and 1800Mhz Memory.
But this eVGA 8800GT KO comes factory overclocked to 675Mhz core, 1950Mhz memory and shader clock is also up to 1688Mhz
[BREAK=MSI 8800GTS 320MB]
MSI 8800GTS 320MB
I received MSI 8800GTS 320MB for testing purpose.
8800GTS by default is clocked at 500Mhz core and 800Mhz GDDR3 memory with 96 shader processors clocked at 1200Mhz.
Memory interface is 320Bit.
MSI also has the OC edition which comes factory overclocked at 575Mhz core, 850Mhz memory and 1320Mhz shader clock.
The card is pretty much standard 8800GTS. Nothing special here.
[BREAK=Sapphire HD2900Pro]
Sapphire HD2900Pro
ATI 2900Pro was launched recently in the market. This card made a very lucrative purchase as it was nothing but the underclocked 2900XT. This card was my choice for the midbudget segment not so long ago. Lets see whats the case now.
It comes with same 320 steam processors, 512bit memory interface which is same as 2900XT.
Its clocked at 600Mhz core and 800Mhz memory. 2900XT on the other hand is clocked at 725Mhz core and 825Mhz memory.
Physically the card looks identical to any 2900XT.
Feature wise this card has something special to offer. It comes with HDMI dongle. And unlike Nvidia's offering, this is able to process audio and pass it over the HDMI interface which is great if you are looking to hookup your PC to HDMI equipped LCD / Plasma TVs. Just 1 cable will carry your audio and video signals.
You do not require extra sound card for this. The card has secondary audio functionality and is capable of producing 5.1 surround sound output over HDMI.
[BREAK=Photoshoot eVGA 8800GT KO 512MB]
Photoshoot eVGA 8800GT KO 512MB
It looks like any other 8800GT with 2 Dual link DVI ports and TV out.
Front of the card
Back of the card.
Whats in the box.
[BREAK=Photoshoot MSI 8800GTS 320MB]
320MB
Photoshoot MSI 8800GTS
Lets have a quick look at front and back of 8800GTS
[BREAK=Photoshoot Sapphire HD2900Pro]
Photoshoot Sapphire HD2900Pro
Quick look at 2900Pro.
[BREAK=System Setup]
System Setup
Here is the system on which these cards were tested.
CPU
: Intel Core2Quad E6600 @ 3.6Ghz (overclocked)
Motherboard : ABIT IP35 Pro
Ram : 4GB PDP DDR2 800
HDD : 4x320GB
PSU : OCZ Gamexstream 700W
Sound Card : Creative SBLive 24Bit (The weak point in the system
)
Operating System : Windows Vista Ultimate 64Bit
Drivers used
ATI Catalyst 7.10 Final
Nvidia Forceware Vista 169.09
System Preparation
The care was taken to ensure the system resembles a regular gaming pc environment and not some highly tweaked stripped down windows with many features disabled.
Clean install of Windows Vista Ultimate X64 retail was used.
Windows Vista was updated with all critical patches and DX9 and DX10 were updated to latest release. Motherboard and Sound drivers were also updated to latest versions available from the manufacturer.
Avast Free home edition antivirus was installed as well and was allowed to start its service at boot but its On Access Protection was disabled while testing to endure that the whatever amount of processor time used by this does not affect the benchmarks.
No other items were allowed to start at boot.
Aero interface was enabled and kept on while benchmarking. This somewhat decreases the scores but there is no point in turning everything off.
Softwares Used
Rivatuner 2.06
Fraps
HardwareOC benchmarking tool
[BREAK=How I tested]
How I tested
Drivers
I left the drivers on both the cards to their default settings. Only Vsync was turned off. ATI driver is by default set to maximum quality. Same is not the case with Nvidia forceware which is by default to 1 notch down from the highest quality settings. But it was left alone.
Overclocking
Overclocking was done using Rivatuner 2.06.
On ATI its very simple, just Core and memory speeds are changed.
On 8800GT and GTS however there is shader clock as well and with this version of Rivatuner you can change that in Sync with the core or separately. I set it to overclock in sync with the core clock. This is what matters more. overclocking shader clock benefits the 8800GT and GTS more than anything else.
3Dmark 2006
3DMark 2006 was updated with latest patch and was allowed to run at its default settings. This is purely synthetic benchmark so I did not spend too much time on this.
Prey
This is another very popular game widely used for GPU benchmarking. To benchmark this I used HardwareOC benchmarking tool. Game was set to max details @ 1680x1050 resolution. Guru3D demo built into the benchmarking tool was used. 4XAA and 16XAF settings was used.
Serious Sam 2
Another very popular arcade game. Huge open areas, HDR, plenty of action on screen makes it ideal game to benchmark the cards. Framerate is usually very high without the Anti Aliasing and default auto detech game settings. But with max details 4XAA and 16XAF the game can be really hard on even modern GPUs.
Game was updated to latest 2.070 patch.
HardwareOC benchmarking tool proved to be little annoying with this game as the settings inputed in the tool did not stick when the game actually ran resulting in very high framerate. So I used built in demos of the game with the Fraps.
World In Conflict
This is highly anticipated new game release which bring out the real eyecandy and DX10 really does make difference in this game. DX10 mode is very hard on the GPU and you will find that out in the results. Game was unplayable on 8800GTS @ stock speeds.
I used max details in both DX9 and DX10 mode and games built in benchmarking tool.
Unreal Tournament 3 Demo
This is probably what most of you will be interested in. The demo is simply stunning and shows what to expect from this game. The gameplay was simply amazing and even though low resolution textures were used for ground the game was simply great looking and ran very well.
All in game settings were set to max. No AA was used as its not supported in the demo and there is no way to force it on the 2900Pro. So to keep the gamefield even it was left out.
Game was ran at 1680x1050. This is one of the few games which is really using the multi core CPUs. All 4 cores were partially loaded during the gameplay.
Enough talks, lets head to the numbers.
[BREAK=3DMark 2006 results]
3DMark 2006 results
There is no competition here. Even at factory clocks 8800GT KO outperformed both 2900Pro and 8800GTS overclocked speeds. This is the first midbudget card which is able to come very close to matching 8800GTX performance in 3Dmark 2006 in a year. Here are the screenshots of 3Dmark2006 scores.
Factory clocks
8800GT @ 725/990
[BREAK=Prey results]
Prey results
As you can see the 8800GT has clear advantage at stock as well as overclocked speeds. The game is not that heavy on the cards so as far as gameplay goes, neither card has any issues in this game. This game seems to become CPU dependent at this resolution as even overclocking does not increase performance that much.
[BREAK=Serious Sam 2 results]
Serious Sam 2 results
There is no competition here. 8800GT dominated this game in a handsome manner. Its clearly much faster than overclocked 8800GTS and 2900Pro even at factory clocks.
[BREAK=World In conflict results]
World In conflict results
The 8800GT is the first card which I have tested so far that plays this game as it should be played. I tested this card at factory speeds only and even at this speed it was able to clearly outperform the 8800GTS and 2900Pro.
[BREAK=Unreal Tournament 3 Demo results]
Unreal Tournament 3 Demo results
As you can see, the 8800GT is top performer. But the botmatches that were used to benchmark this game makes this result somewhat CPU limited. Thats why you see very little improvement over 2900Pro / 8800GTS except in 1 MAP.
[BREAK=Final Thoughts]
Final Thoughts
Everyone had high hopes from 8800GT right from the day it was announced. It has turned the mid-budget market over its head. No doubt about it. It simply leaves previous mid-budget options in dust. The performance is almost reaching 8800GTX levels.
So what does it mean? Do we have the perfect card here? Well answer is "ALMOST".
I know most of you will think, what is this guy talking about? We just saw the numbers, we just saw it outperformed everything else. Then why am I still saying its almost perfect?
Well the reason for it are obvious. In India we are fortunate to have this card available in the market as I submit this review.( After talking with the local dealers even here the stock is limited ). But all over the world, this card is nowhere to be found in stock.
Leave stock issues on the sidelines. Lets talk about the card itself.
It comes with single slot cooling. It got rave reviews and praises from International press for this. But in Indian environmental conditions, this is proving to be 1 major roadblock.
Temperatures by default are hot here. And this card went past 86°C in no time under air conditioned room( 25°C setting ).
Sure increasing fan speed manually helps, but that makes this card noisy. A clear and loud hum starts coming out of fan if its set manually above 55%.
I have taken extra care to make my new build very silent one, and this card has spoiled it for me in this department.
But its price and performance overshadows this issue. This may not even be global issue but only where ambient temperatures are high. But if you want a cool and silent card, you will need to invest in a 3rd party cooler.
Also my overclocking attempts have resulted in very limited memory overclock. The ram carries 1ns GDDR3 memory rated at 2000Mhz. The card refuses to go much above this limit on memory front. But hey you cant complain much can you?
Also to make matter worse, as I am submitting this review, ATI had launched the HD3850 and HD3870 cards in huge quantities. Over half a million of these will be shipped world wide soon enough. Compare that to just 40-50 thousand of 8800GT around the world so far.
NVIDIA needs to get their act together if they dont want to loose out on the X-mas holiday season. They have the winning performance, but not enough cards in market.
As far as product is concerned, it comes HIGHLY RECOMMENDED from me. If you want the performance in Rs.15000 range, 8800GT is the only way to go. Both HD3850 and 3870 wont be able to match its performance from initial reviews.
Funky aka Shripad signing out until the next time......
Special thanks to Mr Anish and Ashish Modi from Mnemonic Systems, Borivali (w), Mumbai who made the MSI 8800GTS available for testing purpose. Without this card this review would not have been possible.
In the volatile GPU market there is a new addition at a time when there are some big game titles launching in this month.
So lets have a look at the shiny new offering from Nvidia this time around, the newly launched Nvidia 8800GT 512MB.
The card that will be reviewed here is eVGA 8800GT KO edition. This comes factory overclocked to 675Mhz core and 1950Mhz memory.
The standard 8800GT speeds are 600/1800.
This review will be somewhat different than all others you see on the internet. It wont be run on your daily plain jane pc. The test setup will be something that will show how these cards perform when CPU and memory bottleneck is done away with and I will only concentrate at high resolution gaming. With the increasing popularity of 20 and 22 inch screens 1680x1050 has become popular choice for gamers and many other will be thinking of switching to these LCDs but dont exactly know how these cards will perform at this resolution. Not many reviews concentrate at this resolution for reason which i fail to understand.
Anyway lets begin.
[BREAK=eVGA 8800GT KO 512MB]
eVGA 8800GT KO 512MB
This particular card was imported from USA. But similar offerings are available in India.
8800GT is a die shrink of Geforce 8800 series. This is the new 65nm version of the 8800 series. So whats changed?
This card comes with 112 steam processors which is more than 8800GTS. And this card gets VP2 video processing unit that was previously found only in 8600/8400 series.
The memory bus is now 256bit which is inferior to the 8800GTS 320bit interface.
The clock speed on NVIDIA reference card is 600Mhz core and 1800Mhz Memory.
But this eVGA 8800GT KO comes factory overclocked to 675Mhz core, 1950Mhz memory and shader clock is also up to 1688Mhz
[BREAK=MSI 8800GTS 320MB]
MSI 8800GTS 320MB
I received MSI 8800GTS 320MB for testing purpose.
8800GTS by default is clocked at 500Mhz core and 800Mhz GDDR3 memory with 96 shader processors clocked at 1200Mhz.
Memory interface is 320Bit.
MSI also has the OC edition which comes factory overclocked at 575Mhz core, 850Mhz memory and 1320Mhz shader clock.
The card is pretty much standard 8800GTS. Nothing special here.
[BREAK=Sapphire HD2900Pro]
Sapphire HD2900Pro
ATI 2900Pro was launched recently in the market. This card made a very lucrative purchase as it was nothing but the underclocked 2900XT. This card was my choice for the midbudget segment not so long ago. Lets see whats the case now.
It comes with same 320 steam processors, 512bit memory interface which is same as 2900XT.
Its clocked at 600Mhz core and 800Mhz memory. 2900XT on the other hand is clocked at 725Mhz core and 825Mhz memory.
Physically the card looks identical to any 2900XT.
Feature wise this card has something special to offer. It comes with HDMI dongle. And unlike Nvidia's offering, this is able to process audio and pass it over the HDMI interface which is great if you are looking to hookup your PC to HDMI equipped LCD / Plasma TVs. Just 1 cable will carry your audio and video signals.
You do not require extra sound card for this. The card has secondary audio functionality and is capable of producing 5.1 surround sound output over HDMI.
[BREAK=Photoshoot eVGA 8800GT KO 512MB]
Photoshoot eVGA 8800GT KO 512MB
It looks like any other 8800GT with 2 Dual link DVI ports and TV out.
Front of the card
Back of the card.
Whats in the box.
[BREAK=Photoshoot MSI 8800GTS 320MB]
320MB
Photoshoot MSI 8800GTS
Lets have a quick look at front and back of 8800GTS
[BREAK=Photoshoot Sapphire HD2900Pro]
Photoshoot Sapphire HD2900Pro
Quick look at 2900Pro.
[BREAK=System Setup]
System Setup
Here is the system on which these cards were tested.
Motherboard : ABIT IP35 Pro
Ram : 4GB PDP DDR2 800
HDD : 4x320GB
PSU : OCZ Gamexstream 700W
Sound Card : Creative SBLive 24Bit (The weak point in the system
)Operating System : Windows Vista Ultimate 64Bit
Drivers used
ATI Catalyst 7.10 Final
Nvidia Forceware Vista 169.09
System Preparation
The care was taken to ensure the system resembles a regular gaming pc environment and not some highly tweaked stripped down windows with many features disabled.
Clean install of Windows Vista Ultimate X64 retail was used.
Windows Vista was updated with all critical patches and DX9 and DX10 were updated to latest release. Motherboard and Sound drivers were also updated to latest versions available from the manufacturer.
Avast Free home edition antivirus was installed as well and was allowed to start its service at boot but its On Access Protection was disabled while testing to endure that the whatever amount of processor time used by this does not affect the benchmarks.
No other items were allowed to start at boot.
Aero interface was enabled and kept on while benchmarking. This somewhat decreases the scores but there is no point in turning everything off.
Softwares Used
Fraps
HardwareOC benchmarking tool
[BREAK=How I tested]
How I tested
Drivers
I left the drivers on both the cards to their default settings. Only Vsync was turned off. ATI driver is by default set to maximum quality. Same is not the case with Nvidia forceware which is by default to 1 notch down from the highest quality settings. But it was left alone.
Overclocking
Overclocking was done using Rivatuner 2.06.
On ATI its very simple, just Core and memory speeds are changed.
On 8800GT and GTS however there is shader clock as well and with this version of Rivatuner you can change that in Sync with the core or separately. I set it to overclock in sync with the core clock. This is what matters more. overclocking shader clock benefits the 8800GT and GTS more than anything else.
3Dmark 2006
3DMark 2006 was updated with latest patch and was allowed to run at its default settings. This is purely synthetic benchmark so I did not spend too much time on this.
Prey
This is another very popular game widely used for GPU benchmarking. To benchmark this I used HardwareOC benchmarking tool. Game was set to max details @ 1680x1050 resolution. Guru3D demo built into the benchmarking tool was used. 4XAA and 16XAF settings was used.
Serious Sam 2
Another very popular arcade game. Huge open areas, HDR, plenty of action on screen makes it ideal game to benchmark the cards. Framerate is usually very high without the Anti Aliasing and default auto detech game settings. But with max details 4XAA and 16XAF the game can be really hard on even modern GPUs.
Game was updated to latest 2.070 patch.
HardwareOC benchmarking tool proved to be little annoying with this game as the settings inputed in the tool did not stick when the game actually ran resulting in very high framerate. So I used built in demos of the game with the Fraps.
World In Conflict
This is highly anticipated new game release which bring out the real eyecandy and DX10 really does make difference in this game. DX10 mode is very hard on the GPU and you will find that out in the results. Game was unplayable on 8800GTS @ stock speeds.
I used max details in both DX9 and DX10 mode and games built in benchmarking tool.
Unreal Tournament 3 Demo
This is probably what most of you will be interested in. The demo is simply stunning and shows what to expect from this game. The gameplay was simply amazing and even though low resolution textures were used for ground the game was simply great looking and ran very well.
All in game settings were set to max. No AA was used as its not supported in the demo and there is no way to force it on the 2900Pro. So to keep the gamefield even it was left out.
Game was ran at 1680x1050. This is one of the few games which is really using the multi core CPUs. All 4 cores were partially loaded during the gameplay.
Enough talks, lets head to the numbers.
[BREAK=3DMark 2006 results]
3DMark 2006 results
There is no competition here. Even at factory clocks 8800GT KO outperformed both 2900Pro and 8800GTS overclocked speeds. This is the first midbudget card which is able to come very close to matching 8800GTX performance in 3Dmark 2006 in a year. Here are the screenshots of 3Dmark2006 scores.
Factory clocks
8800GT @ 725/990
[BREAK=Prey results]
Prey results
As you can see the 8800GT has clear advantage at stock as well as overclocked speeds. The game is not that heavy on the cards so as far as gameplay goes, neither card has any issues in this game. This game seems to become CPU dependent at this resolution as even overclocking does not increase performance that much.
[BREAK=Serious Sam 2 results]
Serious Sam 2 results
There is no competition here. 8800GT dominated this game in a handsome manner. Its clearly much faster than overclocked 8800GTS and 2900Pro even at factory clocks.
[BREAK=World In conflict results]
World In conflict results
The 8800GT is the first card which I have tested so far that plays this game as it should be played. I tested this card at factory speeds only and even at this speed it was able to clearly outperform the 8800GTS and 2900Pro.
[BREAK=Unreal Tournament 3 Demo results]
Unreal Tournament 3 Demo results
As you can see, the 8800GT is top performer. But the botmatches that were used to benchmark this game makes this result somewhat CPU limited. Thats why you see very little improvement over 2900Pro / 8800GTS except in 1 MAP.
[BREAK=Final Thoughts]
Final Thoughts
Everyone had high hopes from 8800GT right from the day it was announced. It has turned the mid-budget market over its head. No doubt about it. It simply leaves previous mid-budget options in dust. The performance is almost reaching 8800GTX levels.
So what does it mean? Do we have the perfect card here? Well answer is "ALMOST".
I know most of you will think, what is this guy talking about? We just saw the numbers, we just saw it outperformed everything else. Then why am I still saying its almost perfect?
Well the reason for it are obvious. In India we are fortunate to have this card available in the market as I submit this review.( After talking with the local dealers even here the stock is limited ). But all over the world, this card is nowhere to be found in stock.
Leave stock issues on the sidelines. Lets talk about the card itself.
It comes with single slot cooling. It got rave reviews and praises from International press for this. But in Indian environmental conditions, this is proving to be 1 major roadblock.
Temperatures by default are hot here. And this card went past 86°C in no time under air conditioned room( 25°C setting ).
Sure increasing fan speed manually helps, but that makes this card noisy. A clear and loud hum starts coming out of fan if its set manually above 55%.
I have taken extra care to make my new build very silent one, and this card has spoiled it for me in this department.
But its price and performance overshadows this issue. This may not even be global issue but only where ambient temperatures are high. But if you want a cool and silent card, you will need to invest in a 3rd party cooler.
Also my overclocking attempts have resulted in very limited memory overclock. The ram carries 1ns GDDR3 memory rated at 2000Mhz. The card refuses to go much above this limit on memory front. But hey you cant complain much can you?
Also to make matter worse, as I am submitting this review, ATI had launched the HD3850 and HD3870 cards in huge quantities. Over half a million of these will be shipped world wide soon enough. Compare that to just 40-50 thousand of 8800GT around the world so far.
NVIDIA needs to get their act together if they dont want to loose out on the X-mas holiday season. They have the winning performance, but not enough cards in market.
As far as product is concerned, it comes HIGHLY RECOMMENDED from me. If you want the performance in Rs.15000 range, 8800GT is the only way to go. Both HD3850 and 3870 wont be able to match its performance from initial reviews.
Funky aka Shripad signing out until the next time......
Special thanks to Mr Anish and Ashish Modi from Mnemonic Systems, Borivali (w), Mumbai who made the MSI 8800GTS available for testing purpose. Without this card this review would not have been possible.
