- Strong Frame Rates Up to 1680x1050 Resolution With Filtering
- Factory Overclocked And Warrantied For Only Slightly More Than Standard Card
- 90-Day Step Up Program
- Direct X 10 Compatible
- Larger Board Size Can Be Problematic With Some Motherboards
- Performance Drops As Resolutions Climb Above 1920x1200
- No Software To Take Advantage of Direct X 10 Yet
- NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS (G80) Graphics Processor
- 576MHz GPU (Shader) Core Clock Speed
- 320MB GDDR3 Graphics Memory
- 1.7GHz Memory Clock Speed
- 16x PCI Express Graphics Interface
- Dual DVI-I Graphics Connectors
- SLI Capable
- S-Video/Component Output
- S-Video Cable, Component Ouput Cable and Two DVI-to-VGA Adapters
- Graphics Drivers CD and Dark Messiah Game (Limited Time)
2/20/07 – The GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB is essentially the same exact graphics card as the previous version only with half the memory. This means it has the same bandwidth and processing capability as the more expensive 640MB versions, just without the same space for texture memory.
eVGA offers their Superclocked series of cards with factory overclocked settings. With the 8800 GTS 320MB Superclocked, the graphics core is clocked to 576MHz over the standard 500MHz and the graphics memory at 1.7GHz over the 1.6GHz speeds. This is a bit higher than what BFG offers and lower than what XFX offers in their overclocked products, but it is also priced between the two.
In terms of performance, the e-GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB does a very good job with today's Direct X 9 and OpenGL based games. It was easily able to run games at the 1680x1050 resolution with high graphics details settings and even with high levels of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering in some cases. One game that it did real well with was Oblivion, where it was able to average 53 frames per second with ultra graphics settings, HDR lightning at 1680x1050. It can still run at 1920x1200 resolutions, but performance does decrease compared to the 8800 GTX.
There are some minor issues with the new GeForce 8800 series cards. They have gotten about a half inch longer than the previous 7000 series cards. This caused an issue where one of the SATA ports on the testing motherboard was unable to be used. Before buying you may want to make sure there is sufficient clearance around the PCI Express graphics slot. The card also supports Direct X 10 graphics with the newly released Vista that makes the card future proof for some time, but there still is no software save a demo from NVIDIA to take advantage of this next generation of graphics.
