GeForce 8800 Roundup

Zitat

We've looked at the 8800 GTX and GTS and we've seen the kind of performance it's capable of from our 8800 launch article. Today we put each of our 8800 samples through a series of tests and saw what kind of power consumption, heat, and noise levels, as well as what kind of user-overclocks they were capable of. We found the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX and the MSI GeForce NX8800 GTX got the highest overclocks of the group and saw some impressive gains in performance because of this.

The EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX w/ ACS3 seems to do a pretty good job keeping heat down, resulting in the highest overclock of the roundup, and there weren't any problems with excess noise with this card. On the opposite end of the spectrum was the Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX. Thanks to the card's unique peltier cooler, the Calibre 8800 GTX had extremely high power demands, even for a card as power hungry as the 8800. Although the GPU ran cooler thanks to the peltier element, we couldn't overclock it any further and it managed to be the loudest card in the roundup. Extra noise, heat and power with no tangible benefit is not what we like to see.

Because most of the 8800s we had for this roundup kept the reference designs, we didn't see much difference between them in terms of power, heat and noise (with the exception of the Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX). Also, as we said earlier, because it's so early on in the 8800's launch, the prices for these cards were generally the same: $650 for the 8800 GTXs and $480 for the GTS cards. We weren't able to find either of the Sparkle cards or the Leadtek Winfast 8800 GTX for sale yet, and the EVGA cards currently available appear to be the standard (i.e. non-ACS3) model, but aside from the Calibre sample, we can expect them to have around the same price tags.