Spécifications
For specifications, the GeForce 8800 GT is close to the GeForce 8800 GTX in terms of calculation power and texture filtering : however, it is very far in memory bandwidth as its bus is limited to 256 bits. It’s the same situation for the Radeon HD 3800 compared to the Radeon HD 2900 XT. The HD 3870 is slightly ahead while the Radeon HD 3850 is slightly behind in terms of raw power.
The GeForce 8800 GTS 512 has very high calculation power and dethrones the Ultra in this characteristic with 7% more. On the other hand, it relatively weak with 40% less bandwidth.
The card
For this test, Point of View was the first to provide us with a sample of its GeForce 8800 GTS 512 EXO Edition which has increased frequencies.
These go from 650/1625/970 to 700/1750/1000 or respective overclocking of 7, 7 and 3%. From this, we noted gains from 2 to 5% depending on the game and compared to cards with standard specifications.
Point of View includes DVI to VGA and DVI to HDMI adaptors, a PCI Express power connector, and the game The Settlers – Rise of an Empire. All of this is announced by the manufacturer for 305 €.
While the card is still in the "silent" category, it is not as quiet as the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra because the fan turns faster in idle. This could be due to a different setting on the part of Point of View that wanted to assure sufficient cooling of its card.
In terms of overclocking, there is currently no program that allows independently modifying the 3 frequencies of this GeForce 8. Through Nvidia’s control panel we were able to carry out a very small overclocking. We were thus able to go from 700 to 730 Mhz for the core and from 1000 to 1050 MHz for memory, which of course couldn’t go much higher given that this was 1.0 ns GDDR3 like with the GeForce 8800 GT.
On the left, the GeForce 8800 GT’s memory, on the right, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512’s. They are identical.Finally, note that while the PCB is identical to that of the GeForce 8800 GT, the power stage is complete on the GTS 512 while this wasn’t entirely true for the former. In this way, enough power should be ensured given consumption that should be logically higher.
On the left, the PCB of the GeForce 8800 GT, on the right, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512’s.Power consumption
We evaluated the power consumption of the different cards. Measurements were taken at the wall socket, in order to have the total power consumption of the power supply, in this case, an Enermax Galaxy 850W.
A large advantage of 65 nanometers is that power use is greatly reduced. While consumption is still relatively high and requires a PCI Express connection we are very far from the extremes of the GeForce 8800 Ultra and Radeon HD 2900 XT.
Consumption in idle is strongly reduced which is a very good thing. In stand-by a GeForce 8800 Ultra consumes 50 watts more than an 8800 GT and 43 watts more than the GTS 512, which however has very high calculation power!
It’s the same for the Radeon HD 3870. In idle, the consumption of the Radeon HD 3870 is extremely low and even lower than that of the GeForce 8800 GT. This is great news. An inactive Radeon HD 2900 XT wastes 60 watts more! To obtain this result, AMD introduced Powerplay to GPU desktops. Thus 2D and 3D frequencies are different and the GPU dynamically changes this parameter depending on the graphic load. If you are watching a game introduction at 30 fps, the GPU doesn’t need to go up to the same frequency that demanding gamers need to play, for example, at 100 fps. We can only ask why this wasn’t done earlier?
The tests
For this test, we used 10 games, four of which support DirectX 10. All tests were carried out in 1920x1200 and 1280x1024 with anisotropic filtering activated when an option in the game. HDR was activated every time when available.
Finally, transparency/adaptive antialiasing were activated in multisampling mode as Nvidia has just implemented a new and more efficient version in its drivers. For AMD, it is forced in many games and its activation is now possible via the control panel.
Of course, all updates to Windows Vista relative to performance were installed.
Test configuration
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850
nForce 680i SLI EVGA
2 GB DDR2
Windows Vista
Forceware 169.04 (169.05 for Crysis)
Catalyst 7.10 beta
Note that we set the Point of View card to standard frequencies for the test via a modification to the bios.
