ECS GeForce 8800 GT Review

Testing:

My interest is piqued with the ECS 8800 GT and I really want to see what it has to offer. I will be putting it through a series of gaming video benchmarks to test the performance and whether the drop in memory clockspeed will make a difference in the comparison to another 8800 GT at stock reference speeds. I will be testing the ECS 8800 GT before the BIOS update with 256MB of memory and after with 512MB of memory. I will also be comparing it to and ASUS EN8800GT with clockspeeds of 600MHz on the GPU and 900MHz on the memory, which is what nVidia has set as the reference speeds for stock 8800 GT video cards. All other components will be run at their stock speeds and voltages to ensure that there are no variables that can affect the outcome of the scores.

Testing Setup:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16HGz (333 x 9.5)
• Motherboard: Gigabyte X38-DS4 w/ BIOS version F2
• Memory: Mushkin Redline XP2-8000 2x2GB @ 1066MHz 5-5-5-12
• Video Card: ECS GeForce 8800 GT w/ ForceWare 169.25
• Power Supply: Ultra X2 750w Extreme Edition
• Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 320GB SATA
• Opticals: Lite-On 8x DVD+/-RW
• O/S: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

 Comparison Video Card:

• ASUS EN8800GT 512MB

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16HGz (333 x 9.5)
• System Memory: Mushkin Redline XP2-8000 2x2GB @ 1066MHz 5-5-5-12
• Video Card: ECS GeForce 8800 GT @ 710Mhz on GPU, 800MHz on Memory

To overclock the ECS GeForce 8800 GT, I used RiveTuner. I turned up the fan to 100% to prevent any possible overheating and slowly raised the GPU speed, running 3DMark06 after every 5MHz increase to test for stability. Once the GPU became unstable, I backed it down to the last stable run and then I did the same thing for the memory. The final result I got was 710MHz for the GPU and 800MHz for the memory. These are the speeds that I will run the overclocked benchmarks at.

Benchmarks:

• Video:

1. Crysis
2. Knights of the Sea
3. Bioshock
4. Call of Duty 4
5. World in Conflict
6. Call of Juarez
7. 3DMark 06 Professional