Nvidia GeForce 8800gt review

Overall-9/10

Value-10/10
Good
-Its just that good
Fugly
-severe shortage

Cooling-6/10
Good
-singleslot
-does get the job done
Fugly
-Fucked up auto fan speed
-hellish temperature
-noisy when fan speed is increased

Performance-9/10
Good
-Let the performance scores do the talking
Fugly
-Why cripple such a beautiful card with 256bit memory bandwidth?!

Test setup
Intel Allendale E6300 @2800MHZ 1600FSB ~1.300V
Gigabyte P965 DS3 v1.0 @400mhz
4GB DDRII PC4300 @800mhz 5-5-5-15 ~2V
XFX 8800GT

WindowsXP
driver 169.02 and 169.21
Overclock wield a healthy 700/1728/1900

3DMark06
default
stock .02 -11066
stock .21 -10890
___oc .02 -11630
___oc .21 -11587

Crysis custom cfg(see previous post on crysis tweaks) at 1280x960
RELIC
________min _ avg
stock .02 -25 _ 30
stock .21 -24 _ 30
___oc .02 -28 _ 35
___oc .21 -28 _ 36

EXODUS
________min _ avg
stock .02 -26 _ 31
stock .21 -22 _ 28
___oc .02 -31 _ 35
___oc .21 -26 _ 34

World in conflict at 1600x1200 2xAA all settings at max
built in benchmark
________min _ avg
stock .02 -20 _ 36
stock .21 -23 _ 37
___oc .02 -27 _ 40
___oc .21 -30 _ 44

Supreme commander:FA at 1280x960 all settings at max
final campaign
________min _ avg
stock .02 -10 _ 50
stock .21 -10 _ 50
___oc .02 -14 _ 58
___oc .21 -15 _ 60

Unreal tournament 3 at 1600x1200 all settings at max
torlan
________min _ avg
stock .02 -36 _ 70
stock .21 -36 _ 71
___oc .02 -45 _ 80
___oc .21 -45 _ 80

Temperature(celsius)1hr crysis
stock auto-96
stock 70% -81
oc auto -101
oc 70% -85

Pwns every game out there other than crysis.Overclocking shows considerable performance gain other than 3dmark06 as it is CPU bound in my setup.The 169.21 driver remove the errors showing up in system log about memory failures and crysis water rendering bug.It also have a nice booast in some games especially world in conflict but show deficit in 3dmark06 and crysis.Did a quick test by overclocking gpu and memory seperately and shows that memory overclock benefit tremendously even it is increased by a minor 100mhz DDR.This card is seriously kick ass for this price tag.Even the 8800gts512 couldnt beat it in terms of value/performance ratio.Although gts512 have a dual slot cooler that is much quieter and alittle cooler but using the 100dollar premium use to buy a 3rd party cooler like zalman or thermaltake wield better results.Of course it has 16stream units more but what g92 needs is a 384bit bandwidth to shine.Looking at the amount of transistors,i seriously doubt the 384 bit controller was removed.
Anyway,this is the best card you can buy for year 2007.Even if you argued that 8800ultra is still superior at high resolutions,presume you could afford a ultra,you can just get 2 8800gt in sli and beat the ultra to pulp.