Wednesday, 7 May 2008
With the recent announcement of the upcoming 9-series from nVidia, spearheaded by the 9800 GX2 which it is rumoured will be released in March, the life-span of nVidia’s current top end 8-series is coming to an end. With both the 8800 GTX Extreme XXX and 8800 Ultra looking vulnerable, with the former now a year old, the question is: “do these cards still represent a wise purchase?” It is the GTX Extreme XXX that we’re looking at today; so let’s see how it stacks up.
Statistically speaking, the XXX is, as you would expect, excellent. Building on the standard GTX’s unified architecture of 128 stream processors running at 1.35 GHz, with a GPU clocked at 575MHz and the 768MB of RAM clocked at 900 MHz (1.8GHz effective), the XXX ramps up the clock speeds further. The XXX boasts a GPU clock of 630 MHz, a RAM speed of 1GHz (2GHz effective) and the same 1.35GHz clock on the stream processors. In addition, both cards run on the same 384-bit interface. This is a sizeable overclock on paper, specifically considering that the XXX uses the same standard HSF seen on the GTX.
The HSF however is perfectly adequate and remains relatively quiet even when dealing with the heightened clock speeds. The card itself though remains huge and as with the GTX it is 269mm long, so it would be advisable to measure up your case before opening your wallet. As with the GTX this card also provides a vast array of features including: HDCP, SLI, Dual DVI Out, HDTV compatibility and a TV Out.
In terms of overall design the card has not changed since the GTX. The XXX still uses the reliable 90 nm process seen on the GTX for the chip and the styling remains as sleek as ever on the board. Just as with the GTX the XXX requires two six pin PCI-E power connectors, with a heavy draw on the PSU. You need a serious power supply to run the XXX stably and it would be advisable to refer to the power draw graph at the end of this review before making a decision.
To test the titanic XXX, I used our Asus Striker Extreme motherboard in partnership with an overclocked and overvolted Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo. This set-up was then coupled with 2GBs of Corsair CM2X1024-6400C4, running at 800MHz and with timings of 4-4-4-12. The operating system used was Windows Vista and the driver revision was nVidia’s latest WHQL Certified 169.25.
As the list of graphs show at the end of this review, the results were impressive. Testing the card with Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3 and Supreme Commander the XXX consistently provided excellent performance, with only the two cores on the E6600 pulling down the minimum frame-rate. The vast amount of RAM on the XXX also allowed for a gradual curve of diminishing results at higher resolutions. This card is most at home at resolutions of 1680 x 1050 or higher and in all but the system breaking Crysis, allowed for playability at 2560 x 1600. It is important to note however that these results were based with the XXX running in Dx9. While the card was still good in Dx10, this is only in comparison with lesser offerings from nVidia and ATI and the XXX only provided playable (25fps or greater) framerates at resolutions of 1280 x 1040 or lower in Crysis.
Despite the impressive display by the XXX in the benchmarks we could not push the card any further with RivaTuner. Even the slightest overclock to the already aggressively overclocked XXX proved to be too much for the card and caused a system crash. Indeed it would seem that even a GPU of this calibre has its limits. It is here though where we hit the crux of the matter. With the inability to overclock the card further, it soon became apparent that you could almost match the speed of the XXX with an overclock on a standard GTX. Results were not kind to the XXX in testing this, with the standard GTX only throwing results 1-3 fps behind it after an overclock. Now of course the overclock on the XXX is guaranteed but it comes at a very high cost.
So what else do you get bundled with the XXX? Well apart from the standard quick install guide, latest drivers and manual, you get a few extras. These include two VGA to DVI dongles, a HDTV block (3-way RCA component), a SVideo cable and a six-pin to Molex power cable. Slightly disappointing however is that there is no top video game title included with the XXX. This feels slightly at odds, considering both the GTX’s pedigree as a gaming card and the slightly mediocre bundle described above. The XXX does however come with a two-year warranty.
Verdict
The nVidia 8800 GTX Extreme XXX offers almost unparalleled performance with modern games, with only the marginally faster Ultra taking the series crown. Unfortunately however, the card does not offer unparalleled value for money. With only a 10 per cent increase in performance over the standard GTX and almost an extra £100 on the cost, it would be foolish not to buy a standard card and overclock it. Well either that or, if you have serious money to spend, wait for the DirectX 10.1 compatible 9800 GX2.