Home : Hardware : Reviews : XFX GeForce 8800 GT Alpha Dog Edition XXX Video Card
XFX’s new alpha dog is their best combination of price and performance yet.
When NVIDIA released the 8800 Ultra, you might say its high price tag caused some consternation amongst gamers. You might also say they freaked out about paying $700+ for a video card – and you’d be right. NVIDIA did the smart thing and listened to their customers, releasing a few less expensive iterations of the GeForce 8800 card, but nothing nearly as powerful as the Ultra – until now.
The new GeForce 8800 GT cards have specifications that are close to the Ultra and GTX cards at one-quarter to one-third the cost, making for an intriguing combination of power and price. But how do they perform in the real world, both in comparison to the Ultra and other, more recent versions of the GeForce 8800 chipset? Today we’ll be testing XFX’s highest-end 8800 GT card, the XXX, to see how well the newest card works.
Specifications
The biggest external difference between the 8800 GT and older 8800 cards is the size: unlike other 8800 series cards, the 8800 GT only takes up one card slot. That’s especially good news for those of you thinking about creating an SLI configuration – using two 8800 GTs makes for a much easier fit inside the case. In addition, XFX modified the heatsink design to increase core clock speeds while reducing temperatures by eight degrees.
Internally, the XFX GeForce 8800 GT XXX features the same performance boosts XFX includes in all of its XXX cards, increasing the memory bandwidth by 16 GB/sec, upping the clock rate by 70 MHz and the memory clock by an impressive 1050 MHz over stock figures. You can see the stock specifications here, and the specifications of the XXX cards here. These two boosts put the 8800 GT XXX at near parity with the stock version of the 8800 Ultra (and the 8800 GTS Fatal1ty, XFX’s most recent 8800 series card), but there’s one important difference: the 8800 GT has a 256-bit memory interface; all of the other 8800 series cards have a memory interface that’s 320-bit or higher.
Performance
Now that we’ve looked at the numbers, let’s see how well the GT plays. To test the XFX GeForce 8800 GT XXX, I dropped it into my test bed, set up as follows:
- Processor: Intel Core2 Duo e6400 Processor
- Memory: 2 GB of Crucial DDR2 PC2-8500 Ballistix Tracer Dual Channel RAM
- Motherboard: XFX nForce 680i LT SLI Motherboard
- Primary Hard Drive: Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 1 TB Hard Drive
- Secondary Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1 TB Hard Drive
- Power Supply: OCZ ModXStream 780W Power Supply
- OS: Windows Vista
- ForceWare Version: 169.02
- Testing Software:
- 3DMark06 Build 1.10.0
- PerformanceTest 6.1
- F.E.A.R. Performance Test
- Silent Planet: Extreme Condition Performance Test
- Call of Juarez Benchmark
