|
|
Reviews Around The Web
|
Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
|
|
|
|
Monday, October 22, 2007
|
|
|
|
|
It has been a good year for nVidia and its partners. The 8800 series has seen little competition, and even when it has, the 8800GTX and Ultra have emerged as the clear winners every time. Being almost a year old the 8800GTX could well start reaching its limits in the newest games at high resolutions, making it a less than stellar purchase. Aiming to find out we fired up all the latest and greatest titles at the Zotac 8800GTX AMP! Edition, giving you a chance to see just how well the card can cope with them. To top it off, we threw a few standard games in the mix as well, hoping to find how much the faster clocks of the AMP! Edition actually help.
|
|
Thursday, September 27, 2007
|
|
|
|
|
Ultimately, the buying decision is going to depend on your needs because there is no clear must buy in the midrange at the moment. Previous-generation DirectX 9 cards outperform their replacements, but the new generation of cards have DX10 support and better HD video capabilities. I guess if you're after a mainstream graphics card with a good set of home theatre features and respectable performance in both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 games, Zotac's card looks to be a better purchase than the Radeon HD 2600 XT, but it's a bit expensive for our tastes at the moment. You could say Zotac's GeForce 8600 GT ZONE Edition is a jack of all trades, master of none at its current price.
|
|
Thursday, July 26, 2007
|
|
|
|
|
|
Zotac's new GeForce 8600 GT ZONE Edition is running without any form of active cooling. It also has an audio input which allows you to feed external audio into the HDMI stream which is output via DVI plus an adapter, which is included of course. For a price of $129, or about $10 over a regular 8600 GT you will get several added benefits for very little extra cost.
|
|
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
|
|
|
|
|
In my profession you become very used to testing cards on a regular basis which continue to spit out 10k runs in 3DMark06, so when you see a card that scores as low as this one it's hard to think highly of it. Though the bottom line is that at this price point it's not actually too bad of a card. In fact it's pretty useful thanks to the low profile design. As for DX 10 performance, while we didn't test that side of things out you?re going to find that you will be forced to play at 800 x 600 in order to get a playable setup. This would defeat the purpose somewhat, as the lower resolution textures just don't look as good and the advantage of DX 10 from a gaming perspective is nowhere near as strong.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
On the whole, Zotac's first foray into our labs has been a pretty good one. Of course there is very little differentiation, aside from clockspeeds, from most other board partners out there because Nvidia's high-end cards are all built by a third party contractor. However, what we have seen is that even a relatively new manufacturer can polish Nvidia's now nine month old GeForce 8800 GTX and create a pretty good product. We're a little disappointed that Zotac didn't increase the shader clock speed, but considering the relatively small performance difference this isn't a massive issue. Games are becoming more shader heavy and as proven by the GeForce 8800 Ultra, the higher shader clock results in ultimately higher performance even despite a lower "core" clock.
|
|
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
|
|
|
|
|
|
8800GTX AMP! Edition is a fantastic graphics card from Zotac, especially considering they are very new to the market. We can see that the overclock really manages to give us some serious performance gains across the board. This is an excellent way for a new company to stand out, and the name "AMP! Edition" sounds pretty funky, too. The biggest let down is the package. The inclusion of component cables is nice but it would have been good to see a game included as well. Though as mentioned earlier, there's probably a good reason for this. Given the company has only officially launched earlier this year, it's likely they haven't been able to strike a deal up with the game manufacturers as yet. On the other hand, the card is clocked at the same speeds as the 8800GTX XXX edition from XFX, so the lack of any included games and the urge to be priced aggressively to compete in the market means that this could be a great alternative.
|
|
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
|
|
|
|
|
Zotac's new GeForce 8800 GTX OC Edition comes factory overclocked with clocks of 630 MHz core and 1000 MHz memory. This is a nice increase over the standard NVIDIA clocks, especially if you consider the small $20 premium and that you don't lose your warranty. For users who are not willing to spend a lot of money for a GeForce 8800 Ultra this card seems to be a viable alternative.
|
|
Thursday, April 26, 2007
|
|
|
|
|
Zotac is a new player in the NVIDIA video card business and one of their first new cards is the GeForce 8500 GT which is based on NVIDIA's brand-new G86 graphics processor. Unlike the reference design Zotac's card is factory overclocked to a GPU clock of 700 MHz which gives the card a healthy performance boost for a price increase of about $10.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Today we will be taking a look at the release of the 8500GT, 8600GT and the 8600GTS. Zotac was nice enough to send over one of each of the cards for testing. With the DirectX 10 support and the price point of these cards it looks like Nvidia as well as Zotac have a real winner on their hands.
|
|
|
|
|
|