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DEATHMATCH
GEFORCE 8800 GTS
Leadtek WinFast PX8800 GTS
$250, http://www.leadtek.com
ROUND 1
GAMING
Despite being outgunned in stream
processors (the 8800 GTS has
just 128 to the HD 3870’s 320),
Nvidia clobbers AMD in gaming
performance—especially when
playing Crysis at high resolutions
(1920x1200 with 2x AA). The key is
Nvidia’s ability to clock its shaders
independently of the chip’s core
clock speed: The core is clocked
at 650MHz, but the shaders hum
along at 1.625GHz. If gaming is your
primary reason for upgrading your
videocard, there’s absolutely no
doubt that the 8800 GTS is the champ
in this round.
Winner: GeForce 8800 GTSROUND 2
MOVIES/HOME THEATER
PC users don’t live by gaming alone.
We also depend on our videocards
to deliver movies—the ones we
create ourselves and the ones that
Hollywood produces for us. Both
cards are capable of offl oading 100
percent of the decoding chores from
the host CPU, even for Blu-ray discs,
but we much prefer AMD’s audio
solution: The HD 3870 has an inte-
grated audio processor that enables
the card to output Dolby Digital
surround sound (5.1 channels) to a
DVI-to-HDMI adapter. The 8800 GTS
requires a separate cable.
Winner: Radeon HD 3870QUICKSTART^
THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALLNvidia GeForce 8800 GTS vs.
AMD Radeon HD 3870
A
s much as we enjoy putting ultra-high-end videocards through their
paces, we know that most people buy more modest components. For-
tunately, the products in this price range have never been more powerful.
The big question now is, Who provides the biggest bang for the
buck? We pitted AMD’s Radeon HD 3870 (equipped with 512MB of
GDDR4 RAM) against Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTS (the model based onthe G92 and outfi tted with 512MB of GDDR3 RAM) to see who delivers
the best price/performance ratio.
The HD 3870 has nearly three times as many stream processors
and boasts higher-end memory and higher clock speeds than the 8800
GTS. Will that be enough to knock Nvidia off its perch? Let’s fi nd out.- M I C H A E L B R O W N
ROUND 3
DUAL-GPU PERFORMANCE
AMD’s CrossFire and Nvidia’s SLI
enable you to increase your rig’s
gaming performance by installing
multiple GPUs. Both companies,
however, require you to use a
motherboard outfi tted with their
chipsets (although you can run dual
AMD GPUs on certain Intel chipsets).
This constraint is entirely artifi cial,
of course, and there is no legitimate
reason you shouldn’t be able to put
a videocard into every PCI Express
x8 or x16 slot on whatever mobo you
own. For that, we cast a pox on both
their houses! The fact that Crysis
running on Windows XP doesn’t
scale at all in CrossFire mode, on the
other hand, gives Nvidia the win in
this round.
Winner: GeForce 8800 GTS