Fast, and we mean fast

Keeping up with its regular production cycle, NVIDIA has added one more powerful performer to its roster—the GeForce 8800 GTX. Manufacturer Leadtek was one of the first to secure it, launching the WinFast 8800 GTX. A full DirectX 10 part, this promises unprecedented performance under Vista.

Leadtek has built the card using NVIDIA’s reference design. The heatsink does a pretty good job at cooling, and is not noisy. The card is long, and we mean long: its 10.5-inches exceeded the width of our D945XBX2 motherboard by over an inch! Not many cabinets will accommodate this card. It requires two Molex power connectors, so you should make sure you have an appropriate power supply. There are two SLI connectors on the card, which essentially double the SLI bandwidth for to-and-fro data transfer.

The G80GTX core features the Unified Shader Architecture, which has the capability of doing physics computations on the chip, so the CPU is not much of a bottleneck. There is 768 MB of 384-bit wide GDDR3 memory at 900 MHz, yielding a (huge!) bandwidth of 84.4 GB/s. This is more than enough for any game out there, with enough headroom for future games.

The card comes bundled with two power connectors and a VIVO cable, which is HDTV-capable. The game bundle consists of just two games—SpellForce 2 and TrackMania Nations.

The card delivers what it promises, gauging from our test results. The performance difference between this card and that of its lesser siblings was not much at the lower, CPU-limited resolutions, but as we went up, cranking up the sliders, this was the only card that held its own against the barrage of our benchmarks. It scored 10879 in 3DMark06, and did 83 fps in F.E.A.R. at 1600 x 1200 in its full glory. Though a shade slower than the stock NVIDIA 8800GTX, this is still one of the fastest cards out there, and with exceptionally good image quality.

Price at Rs 33,000, the card offers relatively good value for money. DX10 is not yet out, so we’ll have to wait to look at the card’s DX10 performance.

Specifications
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX; memory: 384-bit 768 MB GDDR3 @ 900 MHz (effective: 1800 MHz); GPU clock (Geometric): 576 MHz; GPU clock (Shader): 1350 MHz; memory bandwidth: 84.4 GB/s

RATINGS
Performance  4.5
Features  4.5
Build Quality  4.5
Value for Money  4
Overall  4

Contact : TopNotch Infotronix
Phone : 9323546190
E-mail : mushtaq@zebronics.info
Web site : www.leadtek.com
Price : Rs 33,000