Gainward's 8800GT - new high-end best buy card? (Part 1) - Card appereance
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 29 Oct 2007

Since this is basically the same card as the GTS with a new GPU, the board stayed the same size, which makes the card pretty long. With a single slot cooler it looks really slim. The whole PCB is covered with a metal plate, enabling great thermal conductivity. As with all single slot designs, no hot air is exhausted out of the case, but all in all, the amount of hot air in the case should remain the same as with other 8800 models. The bracket has two DVI-I outputs and one 7 pin video out dongle connector. The board features full support for HDMI which can be implemented over a DVI converter or at the discretion of all NVIDIA partners. The other side of the card features a 6 pin power connector, which means that the consumption of the card is more than 75 Watts, or 105W to be exact. It is a lot less than the GTX, which requires two 6 pin connectors, not to mention the 2900XT which utilizes one 6 pin and one 8 pin power connector.

Our standard testbed was used for this card as well:

- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 - EVGA 680i SLI - OCZ PC2-8000 Platinum XTC 2x1GB - Western Digital RaptorX 150GB (WD1500AHFD) - PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW SR - OCZ Vendetta CPU cooler - HP LP3065 LCD screen - Windows Vista Ultimate x64 with patches from:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/windows_vista_hotfixes.html

Testing methods

While 8800GT is an impressive card, its 256 bit memory bus is certainly a weak point compared to the rest of the 8800, especially the GTX and Ultra. Highest resolutions such as 2560x1600 offer very poor performance, especially in DX10 applications. We therefore decided to use only two, 1920x1200 and 1680x1050, which are two of the most used resolutions on today?s wide-LCD screens. In this first part, we'll only cover DX10 scores while the "old" DX9 scores are coming up tomorrow.