Many of you are wondering what’s new with the 8800GT. Well, the 8800GT’s G92 Core is designed on the 65nm process compared to the G80 found on the 8800GTS, which is based on 90nm process. Hence the die area is considerably smaller; 324mm to be exact. It comes with 112 stream processors, 28 pixel pipelines and 56 texturing units, both of which are higher than the 8800GTS. NVIDIA has now included the PureVideo 2 integration, allowing the decoding of HD videos, which is was previously locked unless the software was purchase. The Geforce 8800GT now has the ability to support PCI Express 2.0, which grants double the bandwidth of the 8800GTS. Also, it has Shader Model 4.0 implemented on the chip. All in all, we see a lot of improvement from previous Geforce cards. In terms of power, the G92 runs at a stock speed of 600MHZ with its 512MB DDR3 memory operating at 900MHZ; its definitely faster than the 8800GTS. However, it has lower memory bandwidth.
Not only has the feature been improved, the physical attributes have gone through a make over. NVIDIA has gone back to using single-slot design, which has solved one of the biggest problems;space. The heatsink spans throughout the whole PCB. It’s much lighter and slimmer now, and it is very silent to boot. Yet, the cooling solution didn’t achieve much in keeping the temperature low. We saw an increase from 62°C to 92°C during our tests, and that is really high considering that the power consumed is significantly lesser than its predecessors.
The 8800GT is anything but short of power. During the 3DMark testing, the card scored five figures whether AA and AF were on or not. The running demos of Doom 3 and FarCry were smooth throughout; no jerks were experienced at all. At even the highest quality settings and resolution, the 8800GT performed remarkably, possibly allowing gamers to play at even higher resolutions. In our chart of graphics card scores, the 8800GT’s scores were at par with the 8800GTX!
It goes without saying that NVIDIA has finally given what gamers have always asked for - a top notch card with an affordable price tag, there couldn’t be anything better than this. And to top it off, ASUS included a free copy of Company of Heroes expansion: Opposing Fronts. The ASUS EN8800GT would make for an awesome Christmas present no?
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