XFX GeForce 8800 GTX and eVGA 8800 GTS GPU’s

Overclocking & Power Consumption

Overclocking

Without increasing the fan speed of our EVGA 8800 GTS we set out to find the fastest speed we could get out of it. After a bit of messing around we found that Coolbits no longer gives us the option to overclock!

After consulting NVIDIA we were informed that GPU overclocking is now done through nTune. After arming ourselves with the latest version we loaded it up and started increasing the clock speeds of the core and memory and ended up with 630MHz on the core and 1.96GHz on the memory! That’s an increase of 130MHz core speed and 360MHz memory. We validated our overclock with a 15 minute run of the artifact tester in ATI Tool and also in 3D Mark 2006. This was our highest stable overclock. Let’s see what performance we gained in 3d Mark.

Wow! The overclock really helped out the $450 8800 GTS as we were almost able to match the $600 8800 GTX performance in 3DMark. Best of all this was done for free!

Power Consumption

Well if there are any draw backs to this card it’s just how much power it uses.

Under load the 8800 GTS is actually very good as in most situations it outperforms or is equal to the X1950XTX. The 8800 GTX does consume the most power of any single card on the market today. This should be expected given the performance advantage that it has over the rest of the cards, and that they are still using a 90nm process.