A New Overclocked GeForce 8800 GT Card

As the competition between Nvidia and ATI tightens up, both of them are trying to launch products at lower costs, keeping though their high performance at raised levels. As a response to the launch of GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, ATI brought to the market the well known Radeon HD 3850 and 3870, which were cheaper than Nvidia's graphics card. This determined Nvidia to launch the 256MB version of GeForce 8800 GT. While the original price of the G92 was over 300$, the new 256MB version remained at a 200$-250$ selling price. The difference between the two cards was only of memory speed, which is of 1.4GHz on the 256MB card and 1.8GHZ on the 512MB one.

Some of the best factory overclocks on the market are offered by XFX, and in the case of GeForce 8800 GT 256MB the things remain unchanged, as the manufacturer managed to launch this card with significant clock speed increases. The GeForce 8800 GT 256MB XXX Alpha Dog Edition has the clock set at 650MHz (600MHz on the original GeForce 8800 GT) and the memory clock boosted at 1.6GHz. And the performance level can be heightened, as the card supports more overclocking both for the core and memory. With the small overclocking that is allowed and the factory one, this card may easily catch up with a 512MB version if not leave it behind.

During the tests conducted by Hot Hardware, the card performed quite good. It was only a little behind GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, but it overcame Radeon HD 3850 in most of the cases. On Crysis, the highly anticipated single player game, with all options set to high, which brought a significant load to the card, it managed to get 15,7 fps, which places the card on the third place from the top. 3DMark06, on the other hand, places it on the second place on all tests. It manages to remain on this position on the rest of the tests and even climb to the first with Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, with 63.7 fps at 1600x1200 screen resolution, no anti-aliasing and no anisotropic filtering.

The graphics card features two DVI-D connectors and a Tv-out connector, like any other mid-range or high-end card, but XFX's new GeForce 8800 GT 256MB XXX Alpha Dog Edition can really make the difference. If you plan to buy a new card and you have around 250$, than this is the choice. Although ATI's Radeon HD 3850 is a little bit cheaper, the performance level are significantly different. The Alpha Dog edition knows how to bite.



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