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Verdict: Yet another mid-range GPU from Nvidia, but the recent price drop makes it worth a look for a sub-£100 gaming card.
The 256MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT is a popular card, as it offers great performance for its £125 price tag. With such a powerful budget graphics card, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Nvidia has no need to release another mid-range GPU, and yet the company has done just that with the GeForce 8800 GS. The specs of the GeForce 8800 GS are inferior to those of the GeForce 8800 GT, and the price has now dropped to reflect this. The card now costs only £97.40 from Scan. However, is it worth buying the heavily overclocked Alpha Dog XXX or spending a bit extra on a standard GeForce 8800 GT card?
As you can see from the GeForce spec list, a standard GeForce 8800 GS card has 384MB of GDDR3 RAM, 128MB more than a £125 256MB GeForce 8800 GT. This memory also runs faster than on a typical GeForce 8800 GT card at 800MHz (1.6GHz effective) rather than 700MHz (1.4GHz effective). However, the GeForce 8800 GS only has a 192-bit memory interface as opposed to the wider 256-bit bus of the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT. Even though a typical GeForce 8800 GS card has quicker memory, it's the 256MB GT that has the higher memory bandwidth - 44.8GB/sec compared to 38.4GB/sec. A 512MB GeForce 8800 GT card (currently costing around £140) has a 57.6GB/sec of memory bandwidth.
The GeForce 8800 GS also has inferior GPU specs compared with those of the GeForce 8800 GT GPU. It has a core clock speed of 550MHz, 50MHz slower than that of both GeForce 8800 GTs, and 96 stream processors, 32 fewer than either GeForce 8800 GT GPU. What's more, the stream processors of the new GeForce 8800 GS run at just 1.375GHz, compared to the 1.5GHz stream processors of 256MB or 512MB GeForce 8800 GT GPUs.
On paper, it looks as though the new GeForce 8800 GS might be a stinker, but XFX has applied some heavy overclocks to give the new GPU some chance of success. It has raised the core speed of the GPU on the Alpha Dog XXX by a huge 130MHz to 680MHz. While the memory hasn't been touched, XFX has tweaked the shader processors of the card to 1.7GHz, which is a significant 325MHz overclock.
The card is fitted with a single-slot cooler, complete with a very loud fan that constantly ran at full speed. This could easily be an early-driver bug though. The more important issue is whether the card has enough power to be considered instead of the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT.
In Call of Duty 4, we saw an appreciable speed boost over the 256MB GeForce GT, with a 31fps minimum compared to 27fps at 1,680 x 1,050.
The Alpha Dog XXX's performance in Need for Speed: Pro Street was even better; its minimum frame rate at 1,920 x 1,200 was 39fps, which is 13fps faster than a standard 256MB GeForce 8800 GT card. This is incredible, as it's also faster than the suposedly far superior 512MB GeForce 8800 GT (which scored a 38fps minimum in the same test). This makes us suspect that the updated driver for the GeForce 8800 GS might be responsible for some of its extra performance.
The Alpha Dog XXX almost managed a playable frame rate in Crysis at 1,024 x 768 with a minimum of 24fps - 1fps faster than the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT's score.
Unfortunately, no overclocking software works with the GeForce 8800 GS yet. The card also consumes 26W more power than a standard 256MB GeForce 8800 GT.
Conclusion
Quite why Nvidia thought it was necessary to release another mid-range GPU is difficult to answer. However, as XFX has pushed the GeForce 8800 GS pretty hard in the Alpha Dog XXX, this card's price-to-performance ratio is actually quite good.
If you really can't spend more than £100 on a new graphics card, and can handle the fan that always spins at full revs, it's certainly worth a look. We're slightly sceptical that some of the performance fo the car comes from a more recent driver than the GeForce 8800 GT cards we tested against but at the end of the day, performance is performance.
You can buy the XFX GeForce 8800GS Alpha Dog XXX from Scan for £97.40 inc VAT now.