GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Roundup – Albatron, eVGA and XFX

Overclocking

Many of our readers are wanting to see overclocking numbers, so we changed to one of our trusty overclocking systems and gave it a try. Using the latest NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI motherboard and the Forceware WHQL 169.25 drivers on Vista Ultimate 32-bit overclocking was easy to do with nTune, but that wasn’t good enough for us. Many overclocking utilities will overclock the core and memory, but they don’t overclock the shaders. Since we wanted to overclock the entire card we fired up RivaTuner to get down and dirty with these three great cards. To top it off we benchmarked this new platform with Lightsmark 2007 v1.3 to see how much the overclocking helps, get ready for 13-14% performance boost!

The first card to be overclocked was the Albatron 8800GTS-512X. The default settings have the core clock at 650MHz, the shader clock is 1625MHz, and the memory clock is stock at 972MHz. After using RivaTuner to manually overclock the settings we were able to increase the core clock to 765MHz, the shader clock was then 1912MHz, and the memory clock was 1125MHz. Not bad at all considering that the Albatron 8800GTS-512X was the only card in the group that wasn’t overclocked right out of the box. Our Lightsmark 2007 score went from 302.2 FPS to 341.5 FPS, which is a 13% improvement as a result of the great overclock.

EVGA already overclocked the core and the shaders on the 512-P3-N841-A3, but how much more can it go? The default settings have the core clock at 670MHz, the shader clock is 1674MHz, and the memory clock is stock at 972MHz. After using RivaTuner to manually overclock the settings we were able to increase the core clock to 810MHz, the shader clock was then 2023MHz, and the memory clock was 1075MHz. This was a very impressive overclock on the core and shaders, but the memory just couldn’t go higher than 1075MHz for some reason. The Albatron card was able to reach 50MHz higher on the memory, so it is possible, just not on this card. Our Lightsmark 2007 score went from 307.2 FPS to 347.7 FPS, which is another 13% improvement as a result of the great overclock.

The XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Alpha Dog XXX Edition featured overclocked settings out of the box and is the fastest GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB card that XFX has to offer. The default settings have the core clock at 678MHz, the shader clock is 1700MHz, and the memory clock is at 986MHz. After using RivaTuner to manually overclock the settings we were able to increase the core clock to 805MHz, the shader clock was then 2018MHz, and the memory clock was 1152MHz. The core and shader clocks were just shy of what the EVGA card could do, but the memory IC’s saved the day and was able to go 77MHz higher than the EVGA card. Our Lightsmark 2007 score went from 308.5 FPS to 352.0 FPS, which is a 14% improvement as a result of the great overclock.

To sum up overclocking, all of the cards did great and the G92 core was able to break 800MHz from 650MHz on two of the cards, which is great. By overclocking these cards we get to see how well they really can do when they are pushed!