Home : Hardware : Reviews : Foxconn GeForce 8800 GTS
Foxconn’s latest GeForce card is an excellent option for gamers looking to upgrade to a NVIDIA 8-series.
Ever since the 8-series NVIDIA GeForce cards hit the market back in November, the buzz around the industry has been about DirectX 10 and how it will revive the floundering PC game industry. From About.com’s November review of XFX’s version of 8800 GTX to Maximum PC Magazine's January cover, the critics seem to feel that the impact of the newest, Vista-only version of DirectX and the 8800 GPUs will be to put PC gaming back on top after years of playing second fiddle to consoles.
Whether or not this sea change will occur is still a matter of debate – with Vista still a brand new bird and DirectX-10-capable games still on the horizon, what gamers want to know right now is whether or not the newest generation of NVIDIA cards are worth the investment. Well, let’s find out, with today’s review: the factory-overclocked Foxconn GeForce 8800 GTS.
Specifications
As with past GPUs, NVIDIA divided up the 8800 line into multiple flavors, going with the higher-end GTX and the lower-end GTS for manufacture options. While both types of cards feature support for DirectX 10, 128-bit HDR and 16x anti-aliasing and come as PCI-E cards, there are some differences in clock speed and pipeline size.
In the case of Foxconn’s cards, the differences are 575 MHz to 500 MHz (core clock), 128 at 1.35 GHz to 96 at 1.2 GHz (pixel and vertex pipeline stream processors), 768 MB to 640 MB (amount of onboard memory), 1800 MHz to 1600 MHz (memory clock) and 384-bit to 320-bit (memory interface). On the factory-overclocked version of the GTS I’m testing, Foxconn bumped the core clock up to 575 MHz and the memory clock up to 1800 MHz, essentially making this new GTS more like a GTX-lite.
Package Contents
Inside the box, along with the card, drivers CD, VGA converters and TV-out cord are two surprises: first, a disk with RestoreIT 7 and VirtualDrive Pro 10 and second, a USB gaming pad. The utilities confused me a bit – as you can tell from the names, they don’t really have a lot to do with gaming. Since it looks like Foxconn wrote both utilities, the disc might have been a cheaper way of doing a bundle than working out a partnership with a game publisher.
The game pad, on the other hand, is pretty cool – I plugged it in, got instant installation from Windows (hooray for plug and play), configured Battlefield 2142 to use it and tooled around a bit on the vehicle-heavy Suez Canal map. While I don’t think it would be a good replacement for my mouse, I can see the appeal of using one, especially when flying the helicopters. The pad has a rumble motor built into each side, so it could be a lot of fun to use with racing games, etc.
