XFX 8800GS 384MB

Josh Collins takes a look at this chopped down NVIDIA offering.

This was a sneaky release by any standards, with little publicity world-wide to announce this card. The 8800GS is a chopped down version of the G92 core, and sits below the 8800GT in the model hierarchy. Featuring 96 stream processors compared to the 112 of the G92 GT and 128 of the G92 GTS, the new GS card also operates on a slightly unusual 192-bit memory interface and sports 384MB of memory.

The NVIDIA reference 8800GS operates with a 550MHz core, 800MHz memory and 1375MHz shader. In typical XFX fashion, the card has been overclocked to feature frequencies of 680MHz on the core, the same 800MHz on the memory and an increase to 1674MHz on the shader.

With 96 stream processors it’s no surprise than that the 8800GS can be compared to the 8800GTS 320MB offering based on the older G80 core. The 8800GS is clocked faster in all respects compared to the 8800GTS 320MB, however. Even though the 8800GS has more memory, sporting 384MB, the actually memory bandwidth is still much higher on the 8800GTS 320MB. This is to the tune of almost double that of the GS; this is primarily due to the much smaller memory interface of 192-bit opposed to the 320-bit seen on the 8800GTS 320MB.

Even with the higher memory bandwidth, we still found this single slot cooled budget 8800-series card to be a decent performer for the dollars spent. The card scored 10,321 in 3DMark06 and 14.90, 10.81 and 17.12 for the average, minimum and maximum respectively in our Crysis benchmark.

Testing with the 169.32 Vista 32-bit drivers and using Rivatuner v2.06 to overclock, the card managed to reach individual frequencies of 740MHz on the core, 1030MHz on the memory and 1836MHz for the shader frequency. However, when combined to complete the benchmark suite the clocks had to be lowered to 710MHz, 850MHz and 1782MHz respectively.

At the overclocked frequencies, the card managed a small increase in 3DMark06 to record a result of 10,803 and performance overall appears to have actually gone backwards, ever so slightly, for the Crysis results. We can only assume the odd results are due to unknown ‘golden ratios’ between the card frequencies. We also felt that with additional voltage the card had potential to overclock much further but at stock voltages was strangled to the levels currently achieved.