NVIDIA 8800 series - Tech Preview - NVIDIA 8800 series - Conclusion
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 08 Nov 2006

NVIDIA will introduce two models of the 8800 series today. NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX is the top model, which has 128 stream processors, clocked at 1.35 GHz. Do not confuse this number with the core clock which is 575 MHz (dispatch, texture and ROP units operate at this frequency). The memory interface is for the first time 384 bit, so you can expect 86.4 GB/s of memory bandwidth with a memory clock of 900 MHz (1800 MHz effective). The card has 768 MB of frame buffer memory. The G80 chip, thanks to the many parallel processors has 681 million transistors, more than twice of the G71 chip from series 7.

The weaker model, the 8800GTS, has everything tuned down a bit. The processor count has been reduced to 96, and the operating clock is 1.2 GHz. The core clock is 500 MHz. It has "only" 640 MB of memory operating at 800 MHz, which brings us to 64 GB/s using a 320 bit wide memory interface. It also has a reduced number of ROPs, from 24 to 20.

We will bring you a detailed review of the cards in the following days, as soon as we get some samples from NVIDIA partners. This will be our first review using our new benchmark platform with Intel Quad Core Kentsfield CPU and nForce 680i motherboard.