Hardware Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 512

don't forget you can overclock a GTX as well


what, 235 for a GTX?!?

haha, my friend with eVGA GTX was trying to sell his for 270 on ebay, no one bought it. he has now lost more 35 in a week :O

 

Exactly, it makes me laugh that people seem to forget this. I have a 8800GTS that I've overclocked to run as well as a 8800GTX in real world testing (in most cases). However, it doesn't mean my 8800GTS is as "good" as a GTX cos I could overclock a GTX to Ultra speeds and so on...

Shocking isn't it? It's a one week only offer, and it is a no frills, own brand. But still... it's £235 and comes with a years warranty. I'd rather go for that than your mates second-hand EVGA at £210 let alone £270! Poor fella.

 

Well I was thinking of guying the GTS, and then in Febuary stepping up to the 9x series if it's worth it.

If I buy the GTX OEM, I won't be able to do it.

 

I'm half tempted to buy one myself to go with my other GTX... It'll mean getting a 680i mobo instead of my P5B Deluxe, but I've got to reinstall Windows soon anyway as I'm upgrading from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit. Hmmm, tempter.

I used to volt mod motherboards/graphics cards back in the days of Socket A/9600 XT/9800 SE... I'll have to find some pictures some day.

It depends if you're happy with your current gaming performance... if not, you'd get some more performance out of either the GTX or the new GTS.

 

Its getting a little confusing.

If I could actually buy a GT for under £150 I'd have been seriously tempted to do it already.

The GTX at £235 is somewhat tempting too with the way things are actually going.

Though with a new release coming up in a couple months, I can only hazard a guess at 89xx or 9xxx series coming out, which might just make it all a little moot anyway.

Edit add:

Just occurred to me that the 90nm GTX likely won't have nearly as much headroom for overclocking as the 65nm parts.

I know when the GT hit I read through some forums on overclocking results and it seemed like the GT could hit towards 750 core with watercooling applied reasonably reliably and there seemed to be some consensus that it was probably then limited by voltage below what it was genuinely capable of, with one person doing a volt-mod and getting something like 850! initially. From the sounds of it the GTS 512 comes with beefier voltage regulators out of the box ?

 

GTX?

 

From a source (quite decent one) I've been told something is going to be released late January, and then another release in Late Febuary/March.

 

Oooh, thinking of jumping on the 680i train eh? As I'm sure you're more than aware, it could be a painful ride. 4 boards RMA'd in 4 months for me, with 2 of those being DOA

Dig out the pics! Give me a look at those soldering skills!

The truth is the GTS almost certainly will overclock better (in terms of %) than the 8800GTX, but the question is, how is it relative to performance? By this I mean the 768MB GDDR3 & 320bit memory bus of the GTX is clearly less prone to being saturated than the 512MB GDDR3 & 256bit memory bus of the GTS.

Here's one to argue over - Does an overclock, as a percentage, directly correlate with the same increase in performance, again as a percentage? At what point does the GTS become limited by it's memory bus, when overclocked?

I guess what I'm getting at here is will the GTS see diminishing returns, performance wise, before the GTX in an overclocked scenario??

 

It will be a good long time before I move past 1680*1050, so for the time being at least, the memory shouldn't factor in significantly if the scores seen in reviews like bit-techs are anything to go by (where the GTX begins to pull away more than 10% or so over a GT for instance, seems to be limited to about two rungs or more up the resolution ladder)

How things go in a year or two is another story of course, though with all the 512mb cards (and 320's before them) going out these days I shouldn't think game developers will jump to anything that can only be run decently with 768+ any time soon.

 

This has convinced me more to buy an 8800 GT.

 

Think I'm going to buy one tomorrow as it's £199.99 delivered.

I'd rather buy a eVGA GTS than a OCuK GTX due to warrantys etc.

 

wonder whether the ocuk cards are ok or not