GeForce 8800 Roundup: The Best of the Best
by Josh Venning on November 13, 2006 11:04 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Sparkle GeForce 8800 GTX
Sparkle sent us two cards, one based on NVIDIA's reference design and the other with a more exotic cooling system in place.
First we have the reference 8800 GTX from Sparkle. The card looks no different from NVIDIA's reference 8800 GTX aside from a few Sparkle graphics on the heatsink. Keep in mind that even though many of the 8800 GTXs look nearly the same, each manufacturer puts their own modifications in the card's BIOS, which affect things like fan speeds and power consumption. These modifications will also affect how well each of these cards overclock, which we will look at in the next section.
Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX
For those of you who don't want to be seen with a regular 8800 GTX, Sparkle has what you've been looking for. Sparkle has been getting attention lately with its new Calibre line of graphics cards, which make some pretty radical changes in card and HSF designs, and their Calibre 8800 GTX is no exception. The Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX departs dramatically from the reference design through the use of two cooling fans and a peltier cooling element.
The two fans on the card are used to cool the thermo-electric element, which in turn cools the GPU. The card not only has the standard two PCIe power connectors, but it also has a 4-pin power connector just to power the peltier element. Because of this extra power requirement, we'll see higher power consumption from this card than the others, but as our tests will show, the peltier cooler makes the card run very cool during stressful operation.
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peternelson - Saturday, November 25, 2006 - link
I'm hearing rumours of an even never "dual" type card called 8850gx2.
Anandtech can you reveal any news on this?
at80eighty - Wednesday, November 22, 2006 - link
Annual Computernerd Wanfest of 2006 just rolled into town (im a wanking nerd btw :-p)what i saw in the papers was an ad for an XFX 8800 GTX. but this article doesnt mention it's existence (or i missed it)
or did you pick he GTS as it was a better deal than the GTX?
Modular - Saturday, November 18, 2006 - link
I was just wondering why there are no charts showing the core temps when the cards were overclocked. I'd be interested to see how much more heat these things crank out @ faster speeds. I also heard that they no longet throttle the GPU core when in 2D mode. That seems silly to me as it probably is a huge reason for the high idle power draw as well as the high idle core temps...dpante1s - Wednesday, November 22, 2006 - link
Would be very interesting to see a roundup just for the 8800 GTS cards as I think that many users may only afford to buy this one but would like to know which one of those is the best for overclocking...crystal clear - Tuesday, November 14, 2006 - link
More GeForce G80 Series RevealedPublished on November 13th, 2006
http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=Articles&go...">http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=Articles&go...
G80-200, G80-400, G80-600,G80-850, G80-875
AnnonymousCoward - Monday, November 13, 2006 - link
I believe your overclocking results are horribly flawed and misleading. The max core clock varies with each semiconductor part, so you can't just take 8 cards from different companies and determine which company overclocks the best! They all got different G80 dies.Now, cooling could affect the overclock amount. But based on the cooling results, there's no correlation. Look at Sparkle's poor overclock versus its great cooling, as well as EVGA's and MSI's great overclocking versus heat. No correlation.
At least Page 5 said "Whether the overclocks we reached are due to variability in cores or..." But Page 8 showed more misunderstanding with "The temperature levels of this card under load are even lower than the XFX 8800 GTS by over ten degrees. This is somewhat perplexing considering that our Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX sample didn't overclock very well compared to the other 8800 GTXs."
The conclusion should have been "8800GTX's overclock between 627-659MHz", and don't bold the one in the table from the company that happened to get the best die.
shamgar03 - Wednesday, November 15, 2006 - link
I concur, unless the author can present more evidence?cryptonomicon - Monday, November 13, 2006 - link
They're valueable to me :(Would love if they every got included on vid card roundups like these...
shank15217 - Monday, November 13, 2006 - link
the new nvidia cards are doing great but just take a look at the older 7 series and compare it to the ATI offering. ATI 1950XTX hands the geforce 7 series its butt. I have a strange feeling the R600 will give Nvidia a run for its money.xsilver - Monday, November 13, 2006 - link
i found it interesting that on one of your graphs that the overclocked GTS is able to noticibly beat the GTXwould it be possible at a more sane 1600x1200 resolution?