8800GT G92, 8800GTS G92, the new masters of DirectX 10

Written by Димитър Динчев a.k.a. Veseliq

Thursday, 31 January 2008

 

Page 3 - Pictures, Content, Bonuses

Detailed overview of the cards we will focus our attention in the current review:

MSI NX 8800GTS G92 512MB OC Edition

MSI as usual didn’t spare any wood while producing their video cards packaging. Neither is cheap at the additional bundle. The big box contains not only the card itself, but 3 CDs – Colin McRae Dirt, LotR Online, as well as the compulsory driver and MSI software CD. Also the cables needed – power, DVI to DSUB converters, instruction manual. The rich MSI package makes the card a little prizee but if you play such games, definitely you will enjoy to have them bundled – getting them bundled makes their price much lower compared to buying them separately. The interesting touch however are the yellow caps on the DVI connectors, which are there to prevent the unused DVI connector from dust and oxidation over time.

As usual, for better heat conduction between memory and cooler, thermal gum is used. Personally I don’t think that it’s the best solution, but once you decide to change the video card cooling, most probably you won’t use such thermal connection between radiators and memory. For default usage it manages fine.

The 8800GTS G92 core is marked as G92-400-A2 (respectively G92-270-A2 for 8800GT) as you may have noticed. The MSI’s version is Overclocked Edition and its work frequencies are 730MHz/ 1825MHz/ 1940Mhz core/ stream processors/ memory compared to the referent 650/1625/1940MHz.

Albatron 8800GT G92 512MB

The video card uses the referent design (designed by NVIDIA) for both the board and the cooling. Besides the card itself, the bundle includes power cable (molex to 6 pin), TV-OUT cables, DVI to DSUB adaptors, driver CD. Nothing special, nothing unnecessary, no “freebie” game in the bundle, this said the price of the video controller is 429 BGN (current price for the time of the review), but the import, as earlier said, is limited and it is hard to find.

Again we witness the same thermal gum, but Albatron seems to be a little carried away on the core thermal paste. On general the needed thermal compound is as little as to cover the core GPU die itself. The idea of thermal paste is that you cannot expect the radiator to fit precisely on the core (they on their side are slightly bulging usually) so it compensates this imperfection. But on the other hand, using such quantities makes things worse. Indeed, when I cleaned the core and put a drop of Arctic Silver 5 paste, the core temperature dropped about 6-7 degrees.

MSI NX 8800GT G92 512MB OC Edition

There was no need to remove the cooling of this particular card, after all the design is the same as the referent NVIDIA, same as the Albatron card. The bundle is the same as the MSI NX 8800GTS G92 - Colin McRae Dirt, LotR Online, driver and MSI software CD, user guide, cables, and the box is almost as big. Here you can see the DVI caps up close. With this bundle the price is 492 BGN (by the time of the review), and the card is Overclock Edition – core frequency 660MHz, 1650MHz stream processors and 1900MHz GDDR3 memory, compared to the default 600/1500/1800MHz.