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GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB Round Up

PCI Express x16 graphics cards
Chipset Radeon X1950 Pro 256 MB, 256 bit

This month, hardware review websites everywhere is filled with all the hoopla surrounding the recent launch of NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 Ultra and AMD's Radeon X2900HD XT. With such an extravagant price for the GeForce 8800 Ultra and the somewhat disappointing performance from the Radeon X2900HD XT, budget conscious users who want high end performance will likely find the GeForce 8800GTS a more attractive buy. Of the two flavor of the GeForce 8800GTS, the GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB may not offer much when it comes to high resolution gaming, but it does a very good job at 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024 or 960 with AA and AF enabled. It also doesn't hurt that you can find GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB card near or below the US$ 300 - or slightly more (but still below US$400) in some areas.

The GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB is also in a great position when considering there is no immediate threat to it from AMD. Although the Radeon X2900HD XT is out, the card is targeted to compete with the GeForce 8800GTS 640 MB version, and price as such with an MSRP of US$ 400. From our experience, the GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB offer about the same performance as the 640 MB version, except in high resolutions and in certain games where memory capacity is extremely important.

Unlike it's 640 MB cousin, factory overclocked 320 MB cards are still rare in some areas. Most manufacturers stuck to NVIDIA's reference clocks. That's actually not a bad thing. In our experience factory overclocked cards rarely push the limit, usually offering 'just enough' increase in clock for a 10 percent faster performance. Significantly higher factory overclocks cards are rare and they typically employ more beefed up fan / heatsink or some other exotic cooling. While they may be fun to review or write about, manufacturers have to remember that the main focus of the 320 MB is affordability - which means they should focus on price / performance.

Today, we're going to take a look at four difference GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB cards from four difference manufacturers. They are the ASUS EN8800GTS, Gigabyte NX8800GTS, Leadtek PX8800GTS TDH and MSI NX8800GTS OC Edition. Of the four, the MSI NX8800GTS OC Edition uses a slightly higher core and memory clock.

Overview

ASUS EN8800GTS 320 MB

NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS, 320 MB GDDR3
Core / Shader Clock : 513 / 1188 MHz
Memory Clock : 792 MHz (1584 MHz GDDR3)



Overall Score: 92.5 points

Like most GeForce 8800GTS you see on the market, the ASUS EN8800GTS is based on NVIDIA's reference design. The only noticeable difference seems to be the stickers on the heatsink and fan. Don't take this the wrong way - reference designs are good, but once you've seen one, you've seen them all. As expected, you'll find the usual standard aacesories inside the box, along with the EN8800GTS card. There's an 6 pin to ATX connector cable, an HDTV cable (no S-video cables / connectors) and one DVI-to-analog dongle. So, users who (still) want to hook up a second analog monitor will have to find their own dongle. There's also a black CD case / pouch, an ASUS specialty. Software wise, you'll find one game - you guess it - Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and one application - 3DMark 2006. Now, we actually prefer to have a game instead of a benchmark, but that's just us. Of course, there's also the obligatory driver and manual CD and a SpeedSetup manual for quick setups.


The reference fan / heatsink does a good job of covering most of the card. It is in direct contact with the core, but additional thermal paddings are used. As always, we prefer a more direct contact for a better heat transmission between the memory and the heatsink.

ASUS is probably the only manufacturer in this round up to actually ship a working utility for their card. You'll find the usual software bundle - OSD, GameFace Messenger, SmartDoctor and ASUS Enhanced drivers in the driver CD. You can use the SmartDoctor utility to monitor core temperatures and change the core and memory clock, as shown below. You can also set presets for overclocking profiles and fan control settings with SmartDoctor. Pretty handy if you want a quieter setup with very low fan noise.




Let's see the fan / heatsink in action - we fired up Quake 4 for about 15 minutes to see just how hot the card gets under typical usage scenario. Below you'll see RivaTuner' hardware monitoring graph for the ASUS EN8800GTS.



60° Celsius on full loads is acceptable if not average. The reference heatsink does a good job of cooling down the card.

Overall, we think the ASUS EN8800GTS has some merits over the other standard reference based cards.. It is the only card with working utilities bundled. The rest of the package is pretty standard. For the price ASUS is asking, we certainly expect more differentiating factor than other reference based cards. The inclusion of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter can be a plus factor if you like the game, though personal choices will differ.

Gigabyte GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB

NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS, 320 MB GDDR3
Core / Shader Clock : 513 / 1188 MHz
Memory Clock : 792 MHz (1584 MHz GDDR3)



Overall Score: 91.5 points

The Gigabyte NX8800GTS is your typical reference based card. In fact, the only noticeable difference is the sticker on the heatsink and fan. What makes the Gigabyte NX8800GTS a little bit different from the average reference card is not the card itself, but little things Gigabyte bundled with the card. Inside the box, along with the graphics card itself, you'll find the standard 6 pin to ATX cable  / connector, an HDTV dongle with a S-Video connector and two DVI-to-analog dongle. It's a well thought out package - the only gripe with this package we can think of is Gigabyte didn't include a longer cable or a long enough extension cable for the HDTV dongle. In addition the must have driver CDs, you'll also find a full version of Relic's Entertainment Warhammer: Dawn of War inside. Gigabyte was also nice enough to supply plastic covers to protect the SLI bridge, both DVI ports and the TV out connectors on the card.



Unfortunately, Gigabyte's usual utility - V-Tuner - is not bundled with the card, so you'll have to resort to third party utilities if you want to overclock or monitor core temperatures and fan speeds. Below, you can see RivaTuner's fan tab, showing the fan is set to full throttle for both desktop and 3D use..



Let's see how the card fare temperature wise on typical usage. After about 15 minutes of Quake 4, here's what we've got with RivaTuner.



It is slight cooler than the ASUS EN8800GTS at 66° Celsius at full load. Notice that ambient temperature are pretty much the same between the two card at that point (48° Celsius with the Gigabyte NX8800GTS and 49° Celsius with the ASUS EN8800GTS). It may just be normal variations between cards, but that's a pretty noticeable full load temperature difference (10 percent). We didn't check what voltages (for core and memory) the cards are using, but we think ASUS is using slightly higher voltages than Gigabyte did for their card. Slightly higher voltage may lead to higher overclocks without resorting to volt modding the card.

Overall, we think the Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro is a card with a good, all around bundle. You can hook up your HDTV to this card or even your standard definition TV if you want to. Gigabyte is also kind enough to still offer S-Video output and cables in the box. Users also don't have to buy another dongle if they want to hook up two analog monitors to the card. The inclusion of just one game might be the only minus point of this card, but that also means it's very likely Gigabyte can charge less for their NX8800GTS and that's a good thing.

Leadtek PX8800GTS TDH 320 MB

NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS, 320 MB GDDR3
Core / Shader Clock : 513 / 1188 MHz
Memory Clock : 792 MHz (1584 MHz GDDR3)



Overall Score: 90 points

While it may look different, the fan / heatsink on Leadtek's PX8800GTS TDH 320 MB is still based on NVIDIA's reference cooling solution. It has slightly different casing / cover and an additional clamp, but that's about it. To be fair, it is slightly refreshing to see Leadtek had time to 'polish up' the reference cooling solution with style in mind. You'll find the standard accesories inside the box alongside the card itself. One DVI-to-analog dongle, HDTV and S-Video cable plus a 6 pin to ATX power cables. In addition to a driver / utilites CD, you'll also find two full version games - Joint Task Force and SpellForce 2. Not actually games that will push the graphics cards to the limit. Overall, a pretty standard bundle, though we still wish Leadtek had put in a second DVI-to-analog dongle.



Unfortunately, Leadtek's WinFox utility that's bundled with the card is pretty much useless when it comes to overclocking or hardware monitoring. An updated version of WinFox is available, one that's finally works with newer cards. You could get it from Leadtek's official website. WinFox doesn't just offer hardware monitoring and overclocking capabilites, but also provide a good monitor calibration utility - an important tool if you want to setup your monitor for accurate color reproduction and keep image distortion to a minimum.

OK. Let's see how the slightly modified heatsink cools the card in a typical usage scenario. Below you'll see a screen grab from RivaTuner's hardware monitoring utility.



Hmm. At 67° Celsius full load, the Leadtek PX8800GTS is about the same as Gigabyte NX8800GTS and of course also cooler than ASUS EN8800GTS. Ambient temperature is a little bit higher though, at 51° Celsius.

Overall, the Leadtek PX8800GTS TDH offer practically no difference than your average, reference based design cards - out of the box. That doesn't mean you can't get more out of this card. With a BIOS upgrade (which comes with a disclaimer) and an updated utility, you can turn the PX8800GTS TDH into a PX8800GTS TDH Extreme - offering slightly higher performance. Even if you don't want to flash the card, you can eek more performance by overclocking the card with the updated WinFox tool.

MSI NX8800GTS 320 MB OC Edition

NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS, 320 MB GDDR3
Core / Shader Clock : 576 / 1350 MHz
Memory Clock : 837 MHz (1674 MHz GDDR3)



Overall Score: 92.5 points

The MSI NX8800GTS OC Edition is the only card that's factory overclocked, out of the box in this round up. The overclock is quite modest - 65 MHz for the core and 45 MHz (90 MHz effective) for the memory. With such a modest overclock, we didn't expect any significant differences between the MSI NX8800GTS OC Edition and the other cards in this round up. In our experience, MSI have always been more conservative than other vendors. We think the reason for the modest overclock is related to the heatsink used. MSI is still using the reference cooling design. A much higher overclock will likely mean MSI had to use a more beefed up cooler and / or a faster fan. Not really selling points since it will cost more or detract noise conscious users away from the card.

Now, the bundle. We think MSI did a great job with the bundle. You'll find the standard accesories like an HDTV cable / connector, an S-VIdeo cable and two DVI-to-analog inside. The S-video cable also doubles as a cable extension for the HDTV dongle, which is very useful if you want to hook up your PC to that big HDTV you have on the living room. Also a nice touch are connector covers, though MSI only provide two DVI covers, unlike Gigabyte who provide covers for all connectors and ports. You'll find one driver CD and one game bundle, which we think is another highlight for MSI NX8800GTS - Company of Heroes. While we don't differentiate between game bundles, we can safely say users will likely prefer games like Company of Heroes than the usual game bundle. This should make the NX8800GTS OC Edition an attractive package for some gamers.

With a modest overclock, we didn't expect temperatures of this card to be any different from the other cards in this round up. So how what kind of temperatures can we expect? Below is the hardware monitoring screen grab from RivaTuner.



67° Celsius at full load with 48° Celsius ambient temperature - about the same as the Gigabyte NX8800GTS. Practically no difference at all. We'll have to see whether the overclock will bring noticeable differences in performance.

Overall, we're very impressed with MSI's offering. In addition to offering a good, all around bundle with some extra touches, MSI gone the extra length to offer a game bundle we actually want. Of course, there's some personal bias here concerning the game, but even without the game, the card is a very well rounded package. 

Performance

We ran our benchmarks with our usual test settings.  Graphical settings for these games are set to their highest possible values. Notable differences are F.E.A.R where we disable "Soft Shadows", Quake 4 where we use High Quality - not Ultra Quality - but anisotropic filtering was set to "1" for default tests and "16" for AA / AF tests. We used Serious Sam II built in "Maximum" quality preset then change resolution and AA / AF settings accordingly. All of these settings can be seen here. Our TES IV: Oblivion settings are as close as we can get to Ultra High Quality - you can see our test settings here. For Need for Speed: Carbon, we used the game's "Maximum" video quality preset, but change the filtering to "Trilinear" for default tests - AA AF tests are run with "4x" and "Anistropic". NFS: Carbon test were done with the Sprint Race on Lincoln Boulevard.

Unfortunately, we botched up the test results of GTR2. We had used different quality settings for the Leadtek PX8800GTS than the rest of the cards, so we will omit results from GTR2 in this round up. 

We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply and Gigabyte for supplying the Gigabyte P965-DS3P for this article. 

Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775 (running at 7 x 400 MHz)
4 x 512 MB A-DATA 5-5-5-18 PC6400 DDR2-SDRAM
Gigabyte P965-DS3P Intel P965 motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
NVIDIA Forceware 158.19 BETA reference driver
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 8.1.0.1006
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for minimum fps,  blue for average fps and red for maximum fps.  The first group of graphs are results taken with default settings - AA and AF is not enabled. The second group of results are results with 4x AA and 16x AF.

The results:

Interesting to note that the modest overclock on teh MSI NX8800GTS OC Edition does offer noticeable differences with AA and AF at 1024 x 768. - minimum fps are higher by 6 fps or 10 percent. It would seem the double pump shader units of the GeForce 8800GTS will provide great benefits with just small core clock increase. However, that 10 percent is not enough for the card to supply high enough frame rates at 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF enabled.

Performance wise, the other reference clocked cards are about the same - the ASUS EN8800GTS and Gigabyte NX8800GTS. Quite odd is the performance we're getting from the Leadtek PX8800GTS TDH. It is noticeably slower than the other cards, despite running at the same clock and using the same driver and game settings. Did we botched up these results as well? We didn't think so since the other benchmarks don't show the same.


In Quake 4, we see a slightly less difference between the MSI NX8800GTS OC Edition and the other cards - about 5 percent faster overall - certainly not noticeable. On a side note, here we're seeing the Leadtek PX8800GTS TDH offer slightly higher performance than the ASUS EN8800GTS and Gigabyte NX8800GTS, quite a reversal of F.E.A.R results.


We're system limited at 1024 x 768. It's not until we hit 1280 x 960 do we see these cards have the chance to stretch their legs. The MSI NX880GTS OC Edition takes the lead due to its clock advantage. It's about 10 percent faster than the other reference clocked cards. The other cards - the ASUS EN8800GTS, Gigabyte NX8800GTS and Leadtek PX8800GTS TDH are practically indistinguishable from each other in this game.


Remember that Oblivion benchmarks are more susceptible to higher normal variations between runs than the other benchmarks in our benchmark suite. The clock advantage of the MSI NX8800GTS OC Edition is still not enough to push Oblivion at 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF above 30 fps all the time, but is enough to provide noticeable differences at 1280 x 1024 by (again) about 10 percent.


Funny, looks like another odd performance results from the Leadtek PX8800GTS TDH. It's again slower than the other reference clocked cards, this time the differences can be noticeable. On the other hand, you'll also notice the MSI NX8800GTS is noticeable slower than the three cards. It actually has enough power to push minimum fps over 30 fps at 1600 x 1200 with AA and AF enabled. Unfortunately, that's still not enough for a fluid gameplay experience - typically we want 35 to 40 fps minimum in NFS: Carbon.

Conclusion:

With cards based on reference designs and running at the same core and memory clock, we usually don't expect any difference whatsoever. While there is that odd performance with the Leadtek PX8800GTS in F.E.A.R and NFS: Carbon. There's a chance that we also botched up results in F.E.A.R and NFS: Carbon like we did in GTR2, but that's unlikely. The card does offer about the same performance as the ASUS EN8800GTS and Gigabyte NX8800GTS in other games using the same platform, drivers and game settings.

The differentiating factor between these reference clocked cards are bundle and temperature. The ASUS EN8800GTS is slightly hotter than the other cards, with a different bundle (no S-video cable, one game and one software) than the Gigabyte NX8800GTS (one game, S-Video cable plus HDTV on the same dongle) or the Leadtek PX8800GTS TDH (two games, S-Video cable and HDTV). From these three cards, we think Gigabyte has a more attractive bundle - more accesories and the omission of an additional game bundle means the asking price is slightly lower than the others. Your mileage may vary and we think that's not a strong enough point to recommend the card over the others. We do not have the same problem with the MSI NX8800GTS OC Edition. 



MSI GeForce 8800GTS 320 MB OC Edition

We recommend the MSI NX8800GTS OC Edition because we think MSI has put an attractive bundle that has a good mix of performance, price and value. It offers practically the same hardware bundle, in addition to what we think is an outstanding game bundle (Company of Heroes). Temperatures are about the same as reference clocked cards and as the icing on the cake, it offers about 5 to 10 percent higher frame rates in our benchmarks. However, please keep in mind that 5 to 10 percent difference is not much and you may not notice it at all.

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