nVidia 8800GTX: My Review

[NuclearCrap]

Since you guys talk so much about consoles.......here it is, the 8800GTX, nVidia's latest entry to the market.

The 8800GTX ranges from $549 to $799, depending on which model you get. The original launch price was $649, but the prices have gotten knocked down a bit since. The air-cooled (with the reference cooler) version from different vendors costs $549 to $639, while the watercooled version from BFG costs $799, which is very overpriced considering the watercooled version only comes with only a waterblock but not a full watercooling unit, unlike Asus's TOP edition which comes with a Thermaltake Tide Water watercooling unit and a custom heatspreader. Also, some vendors are releasing pre-overclocked versions of this card, such as eVGA's ACS³ edition and XFX's XXX edition, yet they're unnecessary due to the fact that these cards are all great overclockers already.

Sounds expensive? Not if you're looking for high-end gaming power. Multiple tests proved that a single 8800GTX outperforms any non-8800 dual card setups, including X1950XTX CrossFire and 7950GX2 Quad-SLI which are much more expensive than a single 8800GTX. Not only that, the 8800-series also has full support for DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0, making it the only card on the market that can play games on DirectX 10 when Windows Vista comes along at the end of this month.

This is what I used: eVGA 8800GTX


It's pretty huge. It measured 10.5 inches on my ruler, making it longer than the motherboard's width by about 2cm. Instead of the traditional single PCI-E rail to draw power from the power supply, it uses two, and then you'd need 2 SLI bridges if you want to go SLI.

With a new card there are always new things. In Attachment #1, you can see that nVidia has now integrated the option of 16x AA (antialiasing, for smoothening jagged edges around objects) for a single card, although it isn't needed because when playing games at the maximum supported resolution of your monitor where the card renders every pixel, 8x (see Attachment #2) and 16x (see Attachment #3) look exactly the same to the human eye. Just like most ATi cards, the 8800-series can do HDR (high-dynamic range) and AA at the same time while any previous nVidia cards can only do either one. Video memory also received a boost, hence the 8800-series cards all have 12 chips instead of the tranditional 8. The 8800GTS gets 640Mb (512+128) while the 8800GTX gets 768Mb (512+256).

Since I don't have any tools to measure framerates nor am I gonna bother getting Fraps or whatever to measure, I'm just gonna sum it up with words. Either way, this card is bottlenecked by my 3Ghz Opteron, so resolutions up to 1680x1050 or similar would perform about the same as my current 1280x1024. I've been playing Oblivion on maximum settings, with 8x multisampling AA and 16x AF (Anisotropic Filtering) and it was perfectly smooth even with the high-resolution texture mods (see Attachment #4), and of course it plays any games I throw at it with the same AA and AF settings, except for Flight Simulator X which appears to be extremely buggy even when I tried with a 7900GT.

As I mentioned earlier, it's a great overclocker. Attachment #5 shows my 8800GTX @ 660/2430 (575/1800 stock), an overclocking record for the memory, and 11915 3DMark06 for a single card!!

My conclusion: *jaws on ground, drooling*