XFX Geforce 8800 GTX

Our Geforce 8800 GTX sample comes from XFX who are renowned for their high quality graphics cards. Upon opening the shipping box we are presented with a retail product which immediately gives the impression that XFX know what they are doing. The front design is plain yet menacing however also features useful information such as the products core clock speed.

Turning the box over we find a list of features and specifications which rival those detailed on packaging by any other manufacturer. From a reviewer point of view it’s not important what manufacturer puts on their box however when we put our consumer head on we see great value in good packaging which helps those browsing in stores to make informed buying decisions.

After opening the box the initial good impression sticks and we find the GTX in the middle of a huge volume of foam material, there is very little chance of this card getting damaged in transit. Along the edge of the foam we also find a cardboard section and inside are the bundled extras. These consist of some DVI>VGA convertors and 2 TV out cables which are capable of HDTV signals and traditional S-Video.

XFX also bundle some excellent documentation which leaves the end user in no doubt about how to install the product. The Driver CD is a nice to have however in reality 8800 owners will want to head on over to the Nvidia site to download the latest driver. The XFX Geforce 8800 GTX is shown below and it is a monstrous beast.

Shown above is the card as it will arrive, the points of note initially are the dual slot cooler, at this time there are no single slot versions, and the inclusion of two PCIe power connectors. The 8800GTX specs suggest the card should be run on a 450w PSU (30A on the 12v rail) and the inclusion of two power inputs really does give the impression that the card is best suited to a high end PSU. The one thing we did notice was that despite the requirement for two power cords, the XFX card does not come with convertors to change 4pin molex into 6pin connections, giving end users more of an incentive to buy a PSU which has these connectors as standard.

When we turn the card over we can see that as with previous Geforce models the back of the PCB is pretty bare of any sizeable components. The view does allow us to clearly see the SLI connectors along the top of the card. On the GTX model there are two such connectors however at the time of writing only one is required for 8800GTX SLI to work. If two cards are connected by two connectors one will become automatically disabled, basically at this is a future proofing design which is not yet utilised.

Display connectivity on the 8800 GTX comes in the form of 2 Dual Link DVI ports which can output up to 2560x1600 resolution and a TV out which supports component HDTV as well as S-Video.

By removing the cooler we can take a closer look at the PCB and card design. What is immediately noticeable is the size of the G80 core in the middle of the PCB, granted all we can see is the heatspreader however compared to other GPU designs it is around twice the area of a recent GPU. The core clock speed of this particular model is 575Mhz which seems to be the case for all brands of 8800 GTX.

The memory chips used on the GTX are from Samsung and there are 12 64Mb chips on here. The card is capable of supporting DDR1, 2, 3 and 4 however current models use DDR3. There are six memory partitions on a GeForce 8800 GTX GPU, each providing a 64-bit interface to memory and a resultant 384-bit design. The Samsung chips installed on this board have the model number K4J52324QE-BJ1A and are clocked at 900MHz. Combined with the 384-bit memory interface the frame buffer memory bandwidth is very high at 86.4GB/sec compared to 51.2GB/s on the 7900GTX and 64Gb/s on the X1950XTX.