NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512 & GeForce 8800 GT 256MB: Playing with Memory and G92
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 11, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The 8800 GT 256MB: Here at Last
The 8800 GTS 512 isn't the only new NVIDIA card we'll be looking at today. Remember the 256MB 8800 GT that NVIDIA promised us for less than $200? We don't exactly have that, but we've got a $229 XFX GeForce 8800 GT 256MB, which is pretty close.
The Alpha Dog Edition XXX we have runs at a slightly overclocked 650MHz core clock, 1.6GHz shader clock and with 256MB of GDDR3 running at a 1.6GHz data rate. That's an 8% higher core clock, 7% higher shader clock and 11% lower memory clock than a standard 512MB 8800 GT. The card is available and considerably cheaper than the $300 512MB cards floating around, so we'll look at whether losing 256MB of frame buffer matters all that much later on in the review.
The Test
Note that the results from this article can't be compared to those from our 8800 GT and Radeon HD 3800 articles, we're using different hardware, updated drivers and in some cases updated benchmarks to keep up with the latest game patches.
We aren't going to recap some of the basic performance comparisons we did in the two aforementioned reviews, so if you want to know how the 8800 GT stacks up against older cards or how the older GTSes perform, be sure to consult those articles.
Our test platform for this article is as follows:
| Test Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 |
| Motherboard | ASUS P5E3 Deluxe |
| Video Cards | AMD Radeon HD 3870 AMD Radeon HD 3850 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (512MB & 256MB) |
| Video Drivers | AMD: Catalyst 7.11 NVIDIA: 169.12 |
| Hard Drive | Seagate 7200.9 300GB 8MB 7200RPM |
| RAM | 4x1GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1066 7-7-7-20 |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit |
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Griswold - Thursday, December 13, 2007 - link
Also (partly) wrong. Its a good price/performance part and its short in supply. That is why its priced higher. And I'm willing to bet the supply shortage is artificial. Look at how the availability of the GTS 512 is - seems to be much better than that of the GT. Its no surprise. Nvidias margins with the GT must be abyssmal compared to that of higher priced units (thats a given, but they also rendered almost their complete lineup obsolete for several weeks prior to the launch of the GTS 512), but they needed that horse to compete with the 3850/3870 price point.And you really need to stop talking out of your ass about the 3850. Its selling well and its selling at MSRP because supply is decent (and you lecture him about fundamentals... ). I think there was a the register claim of 150k units in 3 weeks. Well, thats three times the amount of the available 8800GT units in the same timeframe. Speaks for itself.
neogodless - Tuesday, December 11, 2007 - link
Whew... just bought an 8800GT and would like to feel like it was a good buy for a *little while*! Hope it has enough supply to help drive prices down in general though...R3MF - Tuesday, December 11, 2007 - link
Where are the G92 GTS cards with memory over 2.0GHz?Does this preage the entrance of a G92 GTX with memory at 2.4GHz and a higher core clock?
It isn't rocket science to put some decent speed memory on a midrange card. Witness the 3870 with 2.35GHz memory, so why haven't any of the so called "OC" versions of the G92 GTS got overclocked memory?
At the same time we all want a card that can play Crysis at 1920x1200 at High details and still get around 30FPS. The GTS can get ~30FPS at Medium details........... whoopy-do!
So, we know its possible to economically provide more bandwidth and we know its necessary, but nobody has done so including the OC'ed versions.
Is this because there is a G92 GTX product around the corner?
Yes i know there is rumoured to be a G92 GX2 dual-card sometime in january, but how about a non-cack single card version.
A card with:
720MHz core clock
2000MHz shaders
2400MHz memory
1GB or memory
would absolutely rock, so why haven't we got one?
kilkennycat - Tuesday, December 11, 2007 - link
Memory tweaking of the current series is a tiny marginal benefit with a huge increase in power-dissipation. The G92 represents the last gasp of the current G8x/G9x architecture. The shrink was absolutely essential to nVidia's GPU business to get away from the huge, power-hungry and low-yield G80 GPU.The true high-end replacement family for the 8xxx-series is coming around Q2 of 2008. It has been in design for at least the past year and is NOT just a tweak of the G8x/G9x architecture. If you really HAVE TO upgrade your system right now, just get a SINGLE 8800GT 512. At this point in time, do not invest in SLI. Keep you hands in your pockets and wait for the next gen. A single copy of the high-end version of the next-gen GPU family from nVidia is likely to have more GPU horsepower than dual 8800GTX.
Griswold - Thursday, December 13, 2007 - link
"The true high-end replacement family for the 8xxx-series is coming around Q2 of 2008. It has been in design for at least the past year and is NOT just a tweak of the G8x/G9x architecture."Its going to be an evolved (note: thats a fair bit more than just tweaked) G80/G92. You dont design a completely new architecture in a year. Remember what nvidia claimed at launch of the G80? Its been in the works for several years. They will squeeze every bit of revenue out of this architecture before they launch their true next generation architecture (on which at least one team must have been working since the launch of G80).
retrospooty - Tuesday, December 11, 2007 - link
A card with:720MHz core clock
2000MHz shaders
2400MHz memory
1GB or memory
would absolutely rock, so why haven't we got one?
Ummm.... Wait until the high end card is released in january and then see what the specs are. Its suppsed to be a dual GPU version like the 7950GTX was. So think 2 8000GT SLI performance. The memory wont likely be 2400mhz, but it will be dual channel for 512mbit bandwidth.