OCZ, they’re the guys that make memory right? Well, you’re half right. Although they started out just making memory modules, OCZ have diversified their product line over the years to include flash-based memory modules, processor heat sinks, and even gaming mice!
We’ve tested several of OCZ’s products and found them to be of great quality, and today we’re looking at OCZ’s second attempt into the graphics card market (the first was in 2002) with the OCZ 8800GTX.
There have been loads of reviews around the internet now about how fantastic the 8800GTX is at fantastically high resolutions, so in this review we’re going to be looking at two slightly different things.
Firstly we’re going to see if OCZ’s offering is a worthwhile investment, and secondly whether it is a worth while investment to upgrade from an ‘old’ 7800GTX to still get the best performance in games.
{mospagebreak title=Specifications}
Review: OCZ 8800GTX 768MB graphics card
Reviewer: Jon “Bob The Junkie” Aubrey
Reviewed on: 20th August 2007
Product cost: $565.00
Product provided by: OCZ Technology (http://www.ocztechnology.com/)
Edited by: Jason Hambly, Sean Kalinich
Specifications
NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800GTX Graphics processor (GPU):
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Core Clock – 575MHz
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16*32 x 12 pcs for 768MB 384bit high-speed DDR3
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Memory Clock – 1800MHz
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Integrated Dual 400MHz RAMDAC (up to QXGA 2048 x 1536 @85Hz)
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Support PCI-Express 16X BUS
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Dual DVI+HDTV (S-Video out)
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Dimensions: 280mm * 126mm* 33.5 mm
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Windows® XP/Built for Windows® Vista
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Lifetime Warranty
3D Features:
- NVIDIA unified architecture with GigaThread™ technology
- Full Microsoft® DirectX® 10 Shader Model 4.0 support
- NVIDIA SLI™ Technology
- 16x full-screen anti-aliasing
- True 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting
- NVIDIA Quantum Effects™ physics processing technology
Video Features:
- NVIDIA PureVideo™ Technology
- High-Definition H.264, MPEG-2, and WMV Hardware Acceleration
- 2 dual-link DVI outputs support two 2560×1600 resolution displays
- Integrated NTSC/PAL
- High-Quality Scaling
Connectors:
- 2x DVI-I
- S-terminal for TV-Out
Accessories:
- Installation Guide
- Molex adaptors
- HDTV Cable (include S-video and Composite out)
- S-Video 4pin Cable
- AV cable
- DVI Adapter
- OCZ Driver CD
{mospagebreak title=Packaging and looks}
Packaging and looks ( 4.5 / 5.0 )
The OCZ 8800GTX comes in a black box that is covered with pictures and information about the card. On the front of the box is a big green super car and on the back of the box are several diagrams to show why the 8800GTX is better than other graphics cards on the market.
Inside the box are several layers that start with a black reflective liner that has a cut out section to show the heat sink of the 8800GTX beneath it. Ours somehow got a bit battered, even though the box was in great condition. The next layer is made of very thin foam and has the same cut out as the previous layer. The bottom layer contains the 8800GTX and the accessories.
The card itself comes on a very chic black PCB, which is complimented by the massive black heat sink and fan. This is the standard NVIDIA reference 8800GTX heat sink which OCZ have customised with their own sticker, which features the same green car that was found on the front of the box.
At the top right of the card are two 6 pin PCI-E power connectors that the 8800GTX needs to function. Both of these are required so if you’re considering buying one of these cards you’ll either need a power supply that has two of these connectors, or has four Molex connectors free to use with the supplied adaptors. If you do try powering up this card without both of these connectors attached, have some ear-defenders nearby as the card emits a god-awful screeching sound that’ll have you diving for the off button.
On the back of the card are a huge amount of screws to keep the heat sink bolted to the GPU and memory. It is also easier to see the dual SLi connectors from this view which are currently only used on the 8800GTX and 8800 Ultra cards.
On the end of the card we see the heat sink vent that takes up an entire PCI slot to itself, two DVI connectors and a connector that is used with the supplied HDTV cables.
One thing that these images don’t really do justice to is the shear size of this card. Measuring in at 280mm (11 inches) in length you really need a big case to be able to fit this card in.
{mospagebreak title=Over-clocking}
Over-clocking ( 4.4 / 5.0 )
OCZ say this card is “binned to perfection” – which in the computing world means ‘we use only the fasted tested cards to be our products’, so in theory this means you can over-clock the living heck out of it for maximum performance.
Interestingly the card isn’t over-clocked right out of the box which we would expect from a company geared towards over-clockers, so we had to manually adjust the speeds.
To over-clock the card we used NVIDIA’s nTune software to modify the GPU and Memory speeds. To test the over-clock we ran ATiTool for 30 minutes and watched for any artifacts. As ATiTool currently does not support automatic over-clocking of NVIDIA cards in Vista 64 we had to manually switch between the ‘checking’ mode and the ‘heat up’ mode every 5 minutes. If there weren’t any artifacts after 30 minuets, we upped the speed slightly and tried again.
Once the maximum speeds had been found, we ran ATiTool on an 8 hour over night ‘heat up’ test to make sure the card was nice and warm, and then a 30 minute ‘checking’ test. The NVIDIA ‘Stability Test’ was then run for 30 minutes to verify that the card was stable and then finally we used 3DMark06 to verify that the over-clock was stable in a real life benchmark.
After many hours of playing around we finally settled on an over-clock of 630MHz, 55MHz (9.5%) over the stock 575MHz speed to the GPU. The memory over-clocked slightly better and we managed to push it to a stable 2020MHz (12.2%) over the stock 1800MHz speeds.
Interestingly we managed to get a much higher over clock on the memory when the GPU was at stock levels. However when the GPU was over-clocked as well, 2020MHz was the highest stable memory over-clock we could get.
One thing we were impressed with was that after a 30 minute burn-in in ATiTool, temperatures only rose by 3 degrees Celsius after the card was over-clocked, from our stock temperatures so you’re not going to risk cooking your card whilst over-clocking it.
{mospagebreak title=How we test}
How we test
At PlanetX64 we believe that when testing graphics cards there is no point in using synthetic benchmarks to try to prove that you’re going to see good results in games. What you need for that is to play the games and find out for yourself.
To test out a new piece of hardware, we wipe and reinstall the operating system, patch it with the drivers and updates that it needs, and then reinstall the applications and games. That way no benchmark suffers from or takes advantage from any previous drivers or fragmentation that previous installs have caused.
For testing we used Microsoft Vista Ultimate edition x64 as the operating system. Although there have been some problems with the 8800GTX in Vista x64 previously, the recent NVIDIA drivers have ironed most of these problems out, so the results are generally around the same as in Vista x32 or Windows XP.
Frame rates were measured using the FRAPS tool. We ran each game three times so that each game could benefit from pre-loading textures into memory, and to rule out any lagging from the hard drive. We roughly tried to perform the same actions each time, and starting and stopping the benchmark in the same place.
{mospagebreak title=Testing problems}
Testing problems
In my testing hardware I have a 17” Panasonic PF70 CRT monitor. This monitor will quite happily run at resolutions of 1600 x 1200 and above (despite what the specifications say) which is perfect for testing new graphics cards. However when I connected the two NVIDIA cards to it for testing, I couldn’t set it to a resolution higher than 1280 x 1024. No matter what I tried (PowerStrip, Rivatuner) I couldn’t force the NVIDIA drivers to drive this screen at a higher resolution. Figuring I was doing something wrong, I rolled back to the Windows Vista drivers for NVIDIA cards, and from there I could set any resolution I wanted, but with the NVIDIA official drivers installed, 1280 x 1024 was all I was going to get.
In desperation I turned to Google to see if anyone else had managed to get around this problem, and I learnt that I was not alone here, other users are suffering from what is known as the ‘monitor cap’, whereby the NVIDIA drivers puts a cap on resolutions that it ‘thinks’ the monitor can do, even though other programs such as PowerStrip accurately list what the monitor ‘can’ do.
Unfortunately at this time there doesn’t seem to be a way around this problem, so I’ve had to resort to borrowing another monitor from elsewhere and using that for testing (although the maximum it’ll do is 1650 x 1080, it is better than 1280 x 1024), which is why in the benchmarks you won’t see the standard 1600 x 1200 resolution tests.
Unfortunately not all of the games in our testing suite will run at a resolution of 1650 x 1080, which is why in some of the benchmarks you’ll only see resolutions of 1280 x 1024 and not anything higher.
I also suffered a number of games refusing to work under Vista x64 without modification, including Battlefield 2142, F.E.A.R, Command and Conquer 3 (which we had to drop as it refused to work) and Hitman: Blood Money, although with a bit of DLL copying and pasting most these worked without anymore hiccups.
{mospagebreak title=Test system}
Test system
Intel E6300 processor running at 2.9GHz ( 415 x 7 )
Intel ‘Bad Axe 2’ motherboard
Crucial 2GB PC8500 Ballistix memory (5-5-5-15) running at 1:1 with the CPU
OCZ NVIDIA 8800GTX 768MB graphics card
Leadtek NVIDIA 7800GTX 256MB graphics card
Maxtor SATA 80GB 7200RPM hard drive
Enermax ELT500AWT power supply
Windows Vista x64 Ultimate Edition
NVIDIA 158.24 Forceware drivers
{mospagebreak title=Performance – Part 1}
Performance ( 4.7 / 5.0 )
-Battlefield 2142
Battlefield 2142 is a first person shooter game in which players choose to fight for one of two military superpowers – the European Union or the newly formed Pan Asian Coalition -in an epic battle for survival. It is the fourth in the Battlefield Series and definitely the best looking.
We did have a problem when trying to benchmark Battlefield 2142 in Vista x64 as it simply refused to start after being installed, throwing an error about a missing DLL. This problem was fixed by downloading and installing DirectX 9 via the Microsoft Web downloader, after which it played perfectly.
For testing we played through the Sidi Power Plant map until it finished with all of the of the graphics options at their maximums, with 4 x AA.
The 7800GTX performed well here, generally still managing to keep frame rates up at standard resolutions, although we did see some lag when suddenly moving from one area to a completely different one when there was loads of action.
The OCZ 8800GTX faired much better, with even the most action packed scenes rendering without a hitch. Over-clocking brought about a 38% gain at the minimum frame rates, although this has to be taken with a bit of scepticism as it’s nearly impossible to replicate a benchmark in this type of game, as so many variables are constantly changing. The over-clock brought almost nothing at the maximum frame rates due to the 100fps lock Battlefield 2142 imposes.
-Prey
Prey is a First Person Shooter (FPS) game set in a large alien space ship. First announced in 1995, it was eventually released in 2006 on a heavily modified version of the Doom 3 engine with amazing graphics and some stunning in-game effects.
You take on the role of ‘Tommy’, an ex-army Cherokee who gets abducted onto the alien ship along with his girlfriend and grandfather. After watching his grandfather’s death at the hands of the aliens, and falling off of a walkway, Tommy is bestowed with ancient spirit powers that allow him to separate himself from his body.
For testing we played through the Escape Velocity section with all graphics settings at their highest levels and 4 x AA and 16 x AF. In contrary to our other OpenGL game, Quake 4, we ran Prey with a 16 bit colour depth.
Like Battlefield 2142, the 7800GTX started to show its age with Prey. Although the lag was only occasional, it was irritating enough that we wanted to turn the settings down slightly, just so that the minimum frame rates stayed above the magical 30 on a consistent basis.
Prey uses the Doom 3 engine which has a default frame cap at 60 frames per second. Even at stock speeds the OCZ 8800GTX basically hit this limit, and with the card over-clocked we just couldn’t make the game lag at all.
-First Encounter Assault Recon (F.E.A.R)
F.E.A.R is a First Person Shooter (FPS) game in which the plot revolves around a supernatural phenomenon that you (and your team) are called in to contain. Although the game is almost two years old now, it is still a very graphically intensive game and the artificial intelligence is still considered to be very advanced.
For testing we played through several levels with both the computer and the graphical settings at their maximum, and 4 x AA and 16 x AF.
F.E.A.R really pushed both of our cards to their limits. At the low end of the frame rates both cards scored under the magical 30 fps, although with the 8800GTX we didn’t notice it.
Over-clocked, the OCZ 8800GTX managed a respectable 33 fps at the low end and a massive 182 fps at the high end.
-Company of Heroes
Company of Heroes is a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game set in the War World 2 era. It has a very similar feel to the Battlefield xx42 series, with some game play changes that’ll make you keep coming back for more and more. The game uses the Relic “Essence Engine” to provide some stunning graphics, and the Havoc 3 Physics Engine to create a very real environment.
For testing we did a skirmish on the Semois map and played through until we inevitably lost. All settings were set to their highest levels with the Model Detail set to as high as it could go. Anti Aliasing was enabled.
Company of Heroes was one of the few games we tested that would allow us to run it at a resolution of 1650 x 1080. Here we see the 7800GTX starting to suffer, while it manages 1280×1024 without too many problems, 1650×1080 is right on the edge of what this card can handle, and we suffered noticeable lag when zooming around the map.
The 8800GTX performed fantastically here, with the game feeling fluid while bullets were flying everywhere and whilst we were frantically panning around the map trying to get resources into the right places to save our sorry hides (it never worked).
Over-clocking brought a decent 17%+ to frame rates throughout the range here, although even the lowest frame rates at stock speeds were more than enough to keep the action seamless.
{mospagebreak title=Performance – Part 2}
-Hitman: Blood Money
Hitman: Blood Money is the fourth game in the Hitman series, and is arguably the most violent. Once again you take on the role of Agent 47, this time with some more new moves to your already impressive arsenal such as using NPCs as shields and unarmed combat. Testing was done on by playing through the “Death of a Showman” level with all graphical settings on their maximums and 4 x AA and 16 x AF.
One minor thing we did notice when trying to play this game under Vista x64 was that from a normal install it would crash immediately upon starting with an error about msvcr71.dll being missing. A quick download from the internet of this DLL into the Hitman folder, and the game started up without anymore problems.
Chuggg! At 1650×1080 the 7800GTX managed consistent frame rates above the much needed 30 fps, just. We didn’t so much notice the places where the frame rate dropped below 30, more than the game didn’t feel quite so responsive.
The 8800GTX performed fantastically here, only dropping below 60fps occasionally, and the game felt smooth and deadly.
-Quake 4
Never heard of Quake? Get your coat, the door is over there. Quake 4 is the fourth in a set of games that spans back to 1996. In it you play the role of a marine called Mathew Kane, who is part of the elite Rhino Squad. Your job? Secure the Strogg home world and stop the alien menace.
Like Prey, Quake 4 uses the Doom 3 engine to provide stunning graphics and an atmosphere that’ll have you running for mummy.
For testing we played through the Nexus hub level with all graphics set on ‘Ultra’ quality, with all advanced settings turned on. AA was set at 16 times. Unlike Prey, we ran Quake 4 at a 32 bit colour depth as set by the desktop.
What happened to our frame rates?! Even the 8800GTX had a few stutters here and there with the 32 bit colour depth.
-3DMark06
3DMark06 is a widely used synthetic benchmark that is used to create a ‘score’ that can be used to measure a graphics cards performance against other cards. As well as a good way to compare different graphics cards performance, it is also a good measure of how much improvement an over-clock can have on gaming.
We ran 3DMark06 at completely stock settings (1280×1024 no AA or AF) so you can compare it (with a pinch of salt) against other systems.
There is no contest here – the 8800GTX just walks all over the aging 7800GTX.
At stock speeds the OCZ 8800GTX scored 5814 points more than the 7800GTX, and when over-clocked we saw a further gain of 535 points.
{mospagebreak title=Price and warranty}
Price and Warranty ( 4.5 / 5.0 )
At the time of writing the OCZ 8800GTX could be bought for around $565.00 which is roughly around the same price as the other 8800GTX cards from other manufacturers. It would have been nice to have seen a game included for this price, but chances are if you’re buying this card you’ll have all the games you’ll want to play already.
OCZ offer a limited lifetime warranty on the 8800GTX, so if for some reason it dies in a couple of years time, OCZ will replace it without any questions or hassle, just what you need what you’re forking over this much money.
{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion
There are hundreds of 8800GTX cards out there; in fact you can’t swing a cat without hitting a reference card re-branded with a manufacturer’s sticker, our OCZ offering included.
So what makes the OCZ offering any different? Well, from our testing, not a lot. It’s a good over-clocker, but not fantastic, and it’s priced at around the same as the competition. The life-time warranty is certainly a good deal though, and it means that your expensive investment isn’t going to go down the drain if it suddenly dies one day. We were a little surprised to see that the card wasn’t over-clocked right out of the box, considering the reputation OCZ has for providing kit for the enthusiast PC user.
So should you upgrade from a 7800GTX to an 8800GTX to still get the best performance out of games or should you wait until the next generation of cards hits the market?
Based on our benchmarks here, we’d have to say that if you’re looking at running the latest games at 1650px x 1080px or above with all of the graphical goodies turned on, you’ll want to upgrade. In several of our games including Company of Heroes and F.E.A.R we were barely hitting the minimum frame rates needed to run the game without experiencing lag on the 7800GTX, and the 8800GTX just ‘felt’ much better.
Would we recommend OCZ’s 8800GTX offering? Definitely, especially if you’re a big OCZ fan already and want another piece of the pie for your rig. Personally, we can’t wait for the OCZ motherboard and CPU to come out so we can complete our set.
Packaging and looks: 4.5 / 5.0
Over-clocking: 4.4 / 5.0
Performance: 4.7 / 5.0
Price and warranty: 4.5 / 5.0
Overall: 18.1 out of 20
Pros
- Good over-clocker
- Life time warranty
Cons
- No included games
