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GeForce 8800 GT Overclocked Roundup

We have three builder overclocked GeForce 8800 GT video cards from Asus, EVGA, and MSI. We see what kind of gameplay experience can be achieved in Crysis, Half Life 2: Episode 2, Need For Speed: Pro Street and Unreal Tournament 3.

Introduction

On October 28th we showed you a glimpse of NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 GT in the Crysis demo and Unreal Tournament 3 demo. Today we are going to expand our evaluation by looking at the full version of Crysis and include Need For Speed: Pro Street and Half Life 2: Episode 2 concentrating on high-end widescreen gaming performance at 1920x1200.

The GeForce 8800 GT uses a 65nm manufacturing process, PCI-Express 2.0, and a single slot cooling solution. It has 112 stream processors, 16 ROPs, a reference core clock speed of 600 MHz, and a reference memory clock speed of 1.8 GHz. What really sets the GeForce 8800 GT GPU apart in terms of specifications is the fact that it has very high stream processor and core clock speeds for this architecture, with a near 8800 GTX level of stream processors. In our initial evaluation we found it to thoroughly outperform the GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB video card and come very close to GeForce 8800 GTX performance in a few situations.

We have three brand new retail-boxed factory overclocked video cards based on the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT GPU, from ASUS, EVGA, and MSI. In this evaluation we will be testing the ASUS EN8800 GT TOP , the EVGA GeForce 8800 GT SSC, and the MSI NX8800 GT OC. All three of these video cards are overclocked from the factory over reference clock speeds right out of the box and guaranteed to run with the factory overclock. We will dive into specifications and pictures of each video card on the following pages.

High-End Gaming Evaluation

In this evaluation we want to concentrate on widescreen gaming at 1920x1200 to see what kind of gameplay experience these video cards deliver in the latest games considering they are highly overclocked 8800 GT’s. As we saw in our previous evaluation Unreal Tournament 3 ran so well that 1600x1200 was hardly a challenge for the GeForce 8800 GT at reference clock speeds. In this evaluation today we have two video cards which have a GPU clock speed overclocked 100 MHz higher than reference clock speeds, so 1600x1200 is cake with these video cards in the latest games.

Since we already looked at performance at the 1600x1200 level in the previous evaluation, and these video cards perform so well, we need to crank up the resolution to see what kind of gaming experience they can provide. We also need to see if there are any performance differences between the lower-clocked MSI NX8800 GT and higher-clocked ASUS and EVGA 8800 GTs. There is still one game though where we will look at performance below 1920x1200 and that is Crysis, because even as fast as these video cards are, Crysis is the one game that continues to heavily stress even the fastest video cards in existence currently. We will also overclock each video card and look at temperature comparisons after the gameplay evaluation.