Nvidia 8800GT

Review Pages

1. Features
2. Inno3D 8800GT OC Edition
3. XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog Edition
4. Tests and setup
5. Testbed DirectX9, DirectX10
6. Hall of fame
7. Scalability AA/AF
8. Results DirectX9
9. Results DirectX10
10. Overclocking/Noise/Heat
11. Summary

Today we examined the first two 8800GT based graphics cards from Inno3D and XFX. We were curious to see what level of graphics performance both cards could deliver, especially with the latest games, such as Crysis, UT3 and Lost Planet. Nvidia and its partners advertise the newly introduced 8800GT series as the perfect solution for "awesome power" at "awesome price", and to be honest, you should believe them. The Nvidia 8800GT series, judging from our test results, easily surpassed the 8800GTS 320/640 products and came dangerously close to reaching the performance of the 8800GTX series. Without enabling anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing, your frame rates should be very high, even higher than with an 8800GTX. Of course, as AA increases, performance drops, but not to the point where you should be disappointed from this purchase.

The Inno3D 8800GT OC Edition the XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog Edition, are essentially similar graphics cards with the same specifications but with different clock speeds. The XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog is clocked 20MHz higher in both core and memory, compared with the Inno3D 8800GT OC. That provided a slight advantage in most of our tests. However, there is no significant performance difference, even with AA/AF enabled or at the various screen resolutions.

The retail packages are both very good, but we found the XFX solution to be more complete and with a retail game that better suited our needs. But that's purely a matter of taste.

So, if the performance is more or less the same, retail package is a matter of preference, who wins this roundup? I would call this a tie... What is probably the most interesting factor, is the retail price, but we don't want to provide misleading retail prices that will soon drop. There may also be an availability issue with the "Overclocked" editions for both the Inno3D and XFX cards. So, by the time this review goes to air and prices will have settled, take a visit to your local store to get an idea of the retail price for both products.

In any case, we feel that the Nvidia 8800GT is an awesome product at a hopefully good price for medium to power users. If we have to complain about something, it would be the cooling solution, which doesn't keep the core very cool, and nVidia's drivers... They do need extra work to unleash the power of two paired 8800GT cards in SLI.

Concluding this review, we highly recommend the Nvidia 8800GT card to anyone who wants to upgrade their system and gain in both performance and money.