Verdict: Fast clocks, silent cooling, but it's no 8800 GTS.
Your common or garden Geforce 8800 GT card is a fairly sensible creature. It's small, powerful and reasonably cheap; the card's only downside is the whine it tends to produce. It's therefore pretty obvious that with a little tweaking, a GeForce 8800 GT would be the ideal choice for most gamers. Leadtek has done just this to its PX8800GT ZL, making a card that isn't only quieter than a standard GeForce 8800 GT, but also faster. The Leadtek ZL is a chunky GeForce 8800 GT-based card, with beefier clock speeds and a smarter cooler.
The first and most obvious success of the Leadtek ZL is its cooler, which is made by Zalman, and is very quiet despite the increased clock speeds of the GPU. Leadtek has increased the core speed from 600MHz to 650MHz and the stream processors from 1.5GHz to 1.625GHz, while the 512MB GDDR3 memory runs at the usual 900MHz (1.8GHz effective). The reason that Leadtek hasn't altered the memory speed is obvious, as the cooler doesn't cover the DRAM chips. In order to cool the GPU quietly, the cooler is two slots wide, whereas typical GeForce 8800 GTs are single-slot cards. With our test PC consuming 276W of power with the Leadtek ZL installed, the Zalman cooler is being asked to work hard; a well-ventilated case will help to keep the card cool too.
Sacrificing the single-slot size of the usual cooler for quietness seems like a great idea in theory, but it means that comparisons with the dual-slot BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC are inevitable. This is especially so, as the BFG card costs 160 euros on www.play.com and, unlike the Leadtek ZL, its Nvidia cooler exhausts hot air out of the rear of the case.
Considering that it's a GeForce 8800 GT, the Leadtek ZL performs well in games, but the BFG has a superior GPU with more stream processors, so it's a tough card to beat. In Need for Speed: Pro Street, the Leadtek ZL scored a good minimum of 36fps and an average of 49fps at 1,920 x 1,200. However, this score falls short of the BFG by around 10 per cent.
Call of Duty 4 drew more attention to the performance gap between the two cards. While the Leadtek ZL fell a little short of being able to run the game at 1,920 x 1,200, with a chuggy minimum of 23fps, the BFG managed a playable 29fps minimum. At the highest test resolution, the BFG was 26 per cent faster.
The Leadtek ZL struggled in Crysis, falling short of a 25fps minimum in the lowest of our test resolutions, and scoring a 23fps minimum and a 33fps average. The BFG managed a 25fps minimum with a 34fps average at 1,024 x 768. The performance margin between the two cards is slight but noticeable.
Overclocking the Leadtek ZL seemed to be the natural thing to do, given its large custom cooler and performance deficiencies compared with the BFG. Despite the lack of RAM cooling, we were able to push the memory from 900MHz to 950MHz (1.9GHz effective) using nTune, and managed to increase the core speed by 50MHz to give us 700MHz. At these faster clock speeds, the card could handle CoD4 at 1,920 x 1,200, achieving a minimum of 26fps and an average of 46fps. With this DIY overclock, the Leadtek ZL outperformed the BFG in CoD4 at its stock speeds. However, you could also overclock the BFG for extra speed, and there's no guarantee that other Leadtek ZL cards will overclock as well as our card.
Conclusion
By fitting a better cooler and increasing the clock speed of the GeForce 8800 GT GPU in the PX8800GT ZL, Leadtek has countered the two obvious flaws of a standard GeForce 8800 GT card.
However, in doing so, Leadtek has created a dual-slot card with a price comparable to that of the BFG 8800GTS OC. With the BFG costing only £10 more and offering a noticeable extra notch of performance, it's a tempting purchase. The GeForce 8800 GTS of the BFG should yield extra performance when overclocked further, and its cooler directly exhausts heat out through the rear of your case. The Leadtek ZL is still good value, though, and if you don't want to spend more than £150 on a new graphics card and fancy a bit of DIY overclocking, it's a good choice.
