MaximumPC 2007 02

reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized

66 MAXIMUMPC february 2007

N

ew toys arrive in the Lab as fre-

quently as political scandals erupt

in Washington, D.C., a phenom-

enon that renders the Maximum PC staff

a fickle, jaded bunch. But in the absence

of any competition from AT—er, AMD—we

remain intrigued by videocards based on

Nvidia’s 8800 series GPUs. And so this

month, we take a close look at EVGA’s

e-GeForce 8800 GTS.

The 8800 GTS is the less powerful of the

two DirectX 10 GPUs that Nvidia introduced

last November, but we need to put the

phrase “less powerful” in context because

both parts are based on the same G80 chip.

In other words, the 8800 GTS is basically

a hobbled 8800 GTX: It offers 96 shader

processors (floating-point units that Nvidia

refers to as “stream processors”), compared

to the GTX’s 128; 640MB of memory, com-

pared to the GTX’s 768MB frame buffer; a

320-bit memory interface, compared to the

GTX’s 384-bit inter-

face; and 20 raster-

izers, compared to

24 on the GTX.

The 8800 GTS

also runs at slower

clock speeds than

its pricier sibling:

The GPU on the

card EVGA sent

us was clocked at

513MHz, compared to 500MHz stock, but

the memory was ever-so-slightly under-

clocked at 792MHz, compared to 800MHz

stock. Compare these specs to the GTX’s

575MHz core and 800MHz memory. And if

you’re interested in dropping an HD-DVD

or Blu-ray drive into your rig, EVGA’s imple-

mentation includes the HDCP CryptoROM

that Nvidia’s NVIO chip needs to display

Hollywood movies at their full resolution.

The upside to the 8800 GTS’s down-

sized speeds and feeds is a significantly

lower price tag compared to cards based

on the 8800 GTX. At press time, the

e-GeForce 8800 GTS was selling for

$440 before taking a mail-in rebate into

account. The least-expensive 8800 GTX

board we could find, meanwhile, was

fetching a princely $610. But if you want

a videocard that’s capable of delivering

DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0, there’s

currently nothing cheaper than 8800 GTS-

based products.

If you’re willing to stick with DirectX 9

games—and who’s to argue, since currently

there aren’t any DX10 games—the dual-

GPU 7950 GX2 is significantly faster. But

it looks as though these cards

are not long for this Earth: We

found only three SKUs in stock

at New Egg as we were going to

press—and all three were priced

higher than cards based on the

8800 GTS. And, as with all of

Nvidia’s 7 series GPUs, the 7950

GX2 is incapable of performing

antialiasing and high-dynamic-

range lighting at the same time.

If you are willing to limit

yourself to DX9, on the other

hand, boards based on

AT—, ahem, AMD’s ATI Radeon X1950

XTX—also outperform the 8800 GTS.

These cards can do AA and HDR at the

same time, and some vendors are selling

them for less than 8800 GTS cards. But

it bears repeating that the X1950 XTX is

incompatible with DX10 and Shader Model

4.0, and then there’s the whole PITA fac-

tor of CrossFire and its external dongle

to consider, should you decide to build a

dual-GPU rig.

Returning to the matter at hand, the

e-GeForce 8800 GTS is no slouch: It

delivered Quake 4 scores of 65.5fps at

1920x1200 resolution, with 4x antialias-

ing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled.

While that’s nearly 33fps slower than

the tonier 8800 GTX-based Asus card

we reviewed in January, running two of

EVGA’s cards in SLI boosted our Quake 4

benchmark to 111fps—12.6fps faster than

a single GTX. We obtained similar results

with our 3DMark06 , Company of Heroes ,

and FEAR benchmarks. The 8800 GTS is

a helluva GPU, but its DirectX 10 perfor-

mance—to paraphrase former Secretary

of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—remains an

unknowable unknown.

—Michael Brown

EVGA e-GeForce

8800 GTS

Sometimes you gotta pay to play

$440, http://www.evga.com

evga e-geforce 8800 gts

stalag 17

Cheapest DX10 videocard

on the market; plus, AA and

HDR—at the same time!

aBu ghraiB

Expensive, and in the absence

of DX10, no one really knows

how fast it will actually be.

the prices for 8800 gts cards are creeping down, but the

absence of competition in terms of DirectX 10 compliance

continues to slow their descent.

9

MAXIMUMP

C

KICKASS

specs

NUMBER

OF SHADER

UNITS 96

CORE

CLOCK 513MHZ

SPEED

FRAME

BUFFER 640MB (GDDR3)

MEMORY

SPEED 792MHZ

MEMORY

INTERFACE 320-bit

NUMBER OF

RASTERIZERS^20

3DMark06 benchmarks run with 4x AA and 16x aniso; FEAR run with soft shadows on, 4x AA, and 16x

aniso; Company of Heroes run with all settings at max and AA enabled. Tested with an EVGA nForce 680i

SLI motherboard with a 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU and 2GB of Corsair DDR2 RAM.

single eVga eVga 8800

8800 gts gts in sli

benchMarks

3DMark06 GaMe 1 (fps) 18.6 35.2

3DMark06 GaMe 2 (fps) 17.2 32.5

QUake 4 (fps) 65.5 111.0

COMpaNY Of HerOes (fps) 57.4 109.5

fear (fps) 51 99.5

HQV VIDeO 113 113