Gainward's 8800GT - new high-end best buy card? (Part 1)
- Design, thoughts Author: Luka Rakamaric Date: 29 Oct 2007
The cooler on the card is for the first time single slot. That is also a reward of the 65 nm process. It is not too loud, but still louder than the standard coolers of the 8800 series. During boot up the fan spins at max revs, and that situation is quite loud, but we have never seen that it came even close to that during operation under most demanding circumstances.The 8800GT offers more than sheer power at a low price. It also has full support for PureVideo, like the 8600 series. It enables the card to take all of the processing of H.264 and other HD formats. That?s something that the rest of the 8800 cards don?t have. The 8800GT has a second generation PureVideo HD, with three processors: VP2 - designed to accelerate the decoding of the most advanced video codecs including MPEG-2, VC-1, and H.264 at high bit rates, up to 40 Mbps in the case of Blu-ray. But take a look at the card itself:
Taking a look at some new stuff, here we go:
- BSP - specially designed to accelerate H.264 entropy coding schemes known as Context Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) and Context Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC).
- AES128: The AES128 engine accelerates the decoding of the AES128 encryption protocol to support video content security schemes for players and operating systems. Advance Access Content System (AACS)?the security scheme for both HD DVD and Blu-ray?and Windows Vista Media Foundation require that video data (both compressed and uncompressed) be encrypted when sent over a User
Accessible Bus (UAB), such as the PCI Express bus in desktop platforms.
Another addition is the introduction of PCIE2.0, which doubles the available throughput for the PCIE devices to 8GBps in each direction. This is essential for high demand 3D rendering and CUDA GPU computing.
