XFX 8800 GTX XXX Edition Graphics Card Review

Overclocking and Power consumption

My favorite saying about cars comes to mind when it comes to overclocking, “too much horse power is not enough.” Never one to leave well enough alone I strapped our XXX card into a new NVIDIA 680i SLI motherboard equipped with an Intel E6700 Processor and 2GB of 4-4-4-12 RAM from Super Talent. The intent here was to see just how well this card performs once we’re certain that CPU bottlenecks are removed, and then overclock it to see what can be gained.

So how well does an overclocked card overclock? In this case not too well, but that’s the point of buying a factory overclocked card. We weren’t able to increase the core speed over the shipped specification of 630MHz but it was capable of 100MHz overclock on the memory, coming in at 1050MHz (2.1GHz effective). Let’s see how that translates into performance.

We know that FEAR is still one of the most intense games when it comes to GPU requirements so the more video card power the better.

It turns out that FEAR at 1600×1200 is not limited by the CPU at all with our 8800 GTX XXX turning in 83FPS with the E6700. Armed with 100MHz more memory speed we were able to get a decent performance increase of 5FPS! It’s unusual that we see a 5% increase in clock speed anywhere turn into 5% additional performance so it seems the added bandwidth is relieving a bottlneck and could be an indication of where NVIDIA will be headed next when they decide to refresh the series.

Power Consumption :

The XXX edition card uses only little bit more power than the standard GTX. Really no surprises here.