256MB XFX GeForce 8800 GT - first benchmarks

Posted at: 12:41pm 10th December 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

XFX takes on the ATI Radeon HD 3850 with this cut-price card

Either the guys at Nvidia are feeling particularly altruistic or they’ve soiled themselves after seeing ATI’s bargain Radeon HD 3850, but whatever the reason, there’s more mid-range Christmas cheer on the way with this 256MB GeForce 8800 GT from XFX, which costs just £117.36 exclusively from Scan.

Costing just a tenner more than a Sapphire Radeon HD 3850, this is a very tempting card for the money, so why is it so cheap? The first reason is obviously the memory, as the card only has 256MB of GDDR3 RAM, as opposed to the standard 512MB count. However, the memory is also clocked much lower than it is on the 512MB 8800 GT cards. This XFX card’s memory is clocked at just 700MHz (1.4GHz effective), compared with the 900MHz (1.8GHz effective) memory on the Asus EN8800GT.

Otherwise it’s the same, with an identical 600MHz G92 core, 16 ROPs, and 112 stream processors clocked at 1.5GHz. The end result is a card that very closely rivals the Radeon HD 3850, with the same best playable setting in F.E.A.R. of 1,680 x 1,050 with 2x AA and 8x AF. However, the card fared less well in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., where the Radeon card’s best playable frame rate was 1,280 x 1,024 with AA and AF enabled.

Disappointingly, the card couldn’t cope with Crysis, even with everything set to High (as distinct from Very High) and running at just 1,024 x 768. At this resolution, the minimum frame rate was a jittery 13fps, proving that you need more graphics power if you want to run Crysis at respectable settings. To be fair, though, the 256MB GT’s main rival is the Radeon HD 3850, and this card struggles with Crysis too.

Unfortunately, our Need for Speed: Carbon benchmark refused to run, and we haven’t figured out what’s up with it yet, but it’s already clear that the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT is a close rival to the Radeon HD 3850. It’s also worth noting that it’s significantly slower than the standard 8800 GT cards at its stock speeds, which is mainly down to the memory clock speed.

However, we had no trouble overclocking the memory on our test card. In fact, we managed to get the memory clocked all the way up to 1.07GHz (2.14GHz effective), and also got the core up to 687MHz. This made a massive difference to frame rates, increasing the minimum to a smoothly playable 32fps in F.E.A.R. at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA and 16x AF. This is particularly interesting, as it’s the settings at higher resolutions with lots of AA that usually suffer from a lower memory count, but this 256MB card had no trouble when it was overclocked.