Gainward 8800GTS Golden Sample

Factory overclocking delivers a definite performance boost over a stock 8800GTS.

Gainward’s GTS is the first overclocked 8 series GeForce we’ve seen after NVIDIA lifted the embargo on its clock speeds. Until now if you wanted faster core and memory speeds, you’d have to do it yourself and risk your warranty. We haven’t seen any GTXs in labs yet, but they’re floating around in online stores as we speak.

Gainward hasn’t done much here in the clock stakes – upping the core to 550MHz from the default 500MHz, and leaving the memory as is at 800MHz. Still, every little bit counts, and the 8800GTS is a more than respectable performer already, even if we wish the price would drop a little bit more – but don’t expect that until we see an equivalent AMD part.

Putting the card through the usual hurdles with our EVGA 680i, X6800 and OCZ Flex XLC 9200 RAM, in 3DMark06 SM3.0 (4xAA, 8xAF) it returned 2790 at 1280x1024, 2227 at 1600x1200, and 1975 at 1920x1200. In the same respective resolutions in Half-Life 2 (Highest settings, 4xAA, 8xAF) it scored 176.46, 141.90 and 127.21fps and Quake 4 (Highest settings, multi CPU, 4xAA, 8xAF) spat back 116.9, 92.7 and 76.5fps, showing that even at higher resolutions the 8800GTS can deliver playable frame rates.

The 8800GTS is still a fantastic card and Gainward’s overclocked version even more so, managing to keep a sane price and offer great value. The same caveat of not knowing DX10 performance exists due to there being no games yet, but for DX9 this thing is smoking hot