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XFX GeForce 8800 GS 384MB DDR3 XXX Review |
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Written by Димитър Динчев a.k.a. Veseliq
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Tuesday, 26 February 2008 |
Page 3 of 12
Page 3 - XFX 8800 GS Alpha Dog XXX in pictures
Tile to look close to what XFX 8800 GS offers us:
The card comes (as usual for XFX) in a big and beautiful box, well... big compared to other companies boxes. What you can find inside is standard - cables, manual, adapters from DVI to dsub-9. Special notice must be passed on the drivers, since they are not the same as the ones for the other G92 based cards, odd indeed. Very important bonus is the "Do not disturb, I'M GAMING!" door sign. I really wanted to keep it as a reminder for my first XFX card experience but alas my continence wouldn't allow me and besides i thought our partners from Solytrade, the ones that generously supplied us with the cards might object. :D
The card itself at last, in all it's glory. The black PCB is non-referent, XFX's own design. The copper cooler too. Definitely XFX did a splendid job, the card is quiet no matter how mega-overclocked it is, and the new look i s much more appealing too. Here is a picture of the NVIDIA design.
Most noticeable is that the the smaller NVIDIA cooler does nothing for the memory chips. The bigger one from XFX allows them to get to more serious memory and core frequencies still leaving potential for even further increase as we will bi witnessing in this review. Time to do a little dissection of the card...
A perfect amount of thermal paste is used to connect the core and the cooler, while the memory is connected with the usual thermal stickers. Odd is XFX made a PCB especially for 8800 GS, but left 8 places for memory, while using only 6 (6x64 - 384MB total). The core is G92-150-A2 version, in 8800 GT it is G92-270-A2, while in 8800 GTS 512MB it's G92-400-A2. As we stated - although the core for the three is the same, the attempts то flash lower model with BIOS from higher one were unsuccessful, which probably is due to the use of some NAND Flash non rewritable cells , dictating to the core how it should operate regardless of BIOS.
Now let's see the test configuration...
