eVGA 8800GT KO

Top: 8600GTS, Bottom: 8800GT


It clears the hard drive cage just fine except you can't actually put a hard drive directly behind the 8800GT.


- I picked this up from buy.com and got it for $303 shipped. I was lucky to even find one in stock. Of course now it's out of stock and they jacked up the price up to $313. The price gouging on the 8800GT is really getting out of hand.
- Factory oc from stock 600/1800 to 675/1950.
- Came with Quake Wars for free which is nice. It was a game I was planning to get anyways.
- 9 inches long. Still, it was longer than my previous 8600gts so I had to move some hard drives around. It fit fine in my case: THERMALTAKE Tsunami VA3000BWA Black Aluminum.
- 65nm means a lot less power (110w max), single slot solution, takes only one PCIE 6 pin power connector, has the same HD video decoding processor like the 8600 series, and is faster and cheaper on most benchmarks than the 8800gts.
- Beats ati HD 3870 in most benchmarks, only takes a bit more power than the 3870, same exact length (9 inches). 8800gt should be only slightly more expensive than the 3870 once supply catches up to demand. I've seen 8800gt for as low as $207 now.
- on my ancient motherboard: DFI Lanparty nf4 ultra d I ran into an issue where the video card now blocks 2 out of the 4 sata ports. I was using 3 so this caused an issue. The solution is head out to fry's and pick up one of these sata cables for $6:
http://shop4.outpost.com/product/5222857
It has a 90 degree connector on one end.
- 3dmark06 under vista 32bit, latest nvidia beta drivers 169.09:
9116 3dmarks
sm2.0 4154
hdr/sm3 4753
cpu 1799

gt1 34.510
gt2 34.720
hdr1 50.994
hdr2 44.061
cpu1 .562
cpu2 .922
- I ran into performance issues in Crysis (see this post for detail benchmarks) with the 169.09 drivers. Framerate would half for no reason at all after about 10-15 min of play. Dropping back down to 169.04 fixed everything.
- Heat under load is around 86c (idle in the 60's). If you install ntune and just crank up the fan to full speed you can keep the temps down in the low 70's even under full load.

Overall the 8800GT is an incredible price/performance card. Now, supply needs to catch up so prices will normalize.
Highly recommended. There hasn't been a value like this since I bought my ti4200.