Color precision of the highest level
The P-IPS equipped PA246Q reproduces 98% of the Adobe RGB color space, allowing it to accurately display almost the entire color spectrum of a photograph taken with a DSLR camera. The monitor also comes with a sRGB mode so that images meant for display on web pages will be shown as intended. The PA246Q is capable of displaying 1.07 billion colors and calibrated to a maximum ΔE (Delta E) of less than 5, guaranteeing industry-leading color accuracy.

QuickFit Virtual Scale – One-click away for realistic scale measuring
The ASUS exclusive QuickFit Virtual Scale provides real size document, photo and grid formats on top of open windows. It enables a real-sized preview of finished artwork with a simple press of a hotkey.

* Overlay formats:
* Document: A4, Letter,
* Photo: 8”x10”, 5”x7”, 4”x6”, 3”x5”, 2”x2”
* Grid: Alignment, Centimeters, Inches

Users can use it as a guide to quickly and accurately preview images and photo in real size on the screen without actually printing it; achieve high efficiency while saving the planet by using less paper.

Highly versatile for maximum flexibility
The PA246Q is outfitted with an adjustable stand offering 100mm of height adjustment, -5°~+20° tilt, ±60° swivel and 90° pivot for portrait display. The PA246Q’s monitor body can also be removed from the stand for reconfiguration on a VESA-compliant mounting device.

Hassle-free with extensive connectivity
The PA246Q comes with numerous ports for easy access to external devices and media. DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI and D-sub connections allow for a wide range of products to be displayed on the PA246Q. Picture-in-picture multitasking capability also allows users to view images from different signals. Two built-in USB ports enables instant file sharing with USB storage, charging and syncing smart phones or other media devices, and a 7-in-1 media card reader allowing for a quick and easy transfer of photos taken from a DSLR camera.

Specification:

So we are at the start of another holiday season. Sites around the web are soon to release their shopping guides of what the average geek hopes to receive this year. And what a choice we will have this season. The i7 has hit, X58 is out and on the table, both nVidia and ATi have great GPU offerings, and to top it all off there are a ton of new game releases. We thought we would take a look at Six of these new game titles and see what kind of performance you can expect from both ATi and Nvidia on the new i7 – X58 platform. We will try to find the sweet spot in terms of performance that won’t drain your wallet dry.

Product: Holiday Game Release GPU Price/Performance
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: November 16th 2008
Product cost: See Below
Manufacturer: XFX, ATi, eVGA
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

{mospagebreak title=The Contestants}
The contestants:
Budget Enthusiast Gamer Category:
The two entrants here can be found around the web for around $300. While $300 is not normally what would be considered “budget” they are well under the price level of the next rung of performance ($400-500 for the 4850 X2 and GTX 280 class).  Our two competitors are:

XFX Black Edition GTX 260 (216 Cores) 896MB DDR3 (666MHz Core 2300MHz Memory 15% OC)
Average Price: $329.99 for the Overclocked XFX edition, $229.99 for Stock.

ATi HD4870 1GB (Reference Card – Overclocked to 868 Core 1035 Memory)
Average Price: $289.99

Mainstream Gamer:

This category is for the average gamer not looking to break the bank but wanting good performance at a great price.

EVGA 9800GTX + 512MB
Average Cost: $129.99

GIGABYTE GV-R485-512H-B ATi 4850 512MB
Average Cost: $149.99

Our contest here is more of a stock Vs stock contest as neither card is overclocked in any way.
Now I know that someone will say I am running an overclocked nVidia card against a reference HD 4870, but at the time of writing it was what I had on hand. I although I could not match the 15% OC (stock clock is 750MHz and max is 790MHz on the sample I have)I  did bump the stock speed up to 780MHz OC on the Core and the 1095MHz OC on memory.  This is not, strictly speaking, an apples to apples comparison at this point. But does serve as a reference on how each card at the same overclock performs running the same tests.

{mospagebreak title=The XFX Black Edition GTX 260}
XFX Black Edition GTX 260:
XFX Black Edition GTX 260 (216 Cores) 896MB DDR3 (666MHz Core/ 2300MHz Memory – 15% OC)
A word on this card, XFX’s Black Edition GTX 260 is a nice little piece of hardware. From the factory Overclocked GPU Core and Memory to the accessories they put in the box.
The box that XFX put around the Black Edition GTX 260 is an eye catcher.
Inside the box are a few goodies and even a special offer:

The Website for the Dark Side special offer was not working at the time of writing but XFX has assured me it will be up very soon
 

The card itself follows the same pattern as the rest of the GTX line with the stepped hard plastic cooler and cover for the back side of the PCB.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part I}

The Games:

Call of Duty World at War:
The fifth installment in the Call of Duty series takes you back to World War II and puts you in some of the most intense and extreme battles of the war.  This game has great graphics and intense combat.  As with all of the Call of Duty games features the massive “Bar-Fight” AI we have come to love. The Solo game is a little too short but Co-Op and online play are great fun. For testing I ran through the first full battle with Private Miller on Makin Atoll.  Game settings and image quality links are below.

For your Call of Duty World At War gaming it looks like the overclocked HD 4870 1GB is the clear winner. In the Budget Enthusiast gamer category while the 9800GTX+ passes evens the GTX 260 for 2^nd place.

Dead Space:
Dead Space is a horror themed game that is more on the gory side of horror than the thriller side. Set in a dead mining ship, you take the role of an engineer sent to fix a communications problem. It becomes very apparent that there is more wrong with the ship than just communications as you fight for your life against grotesque and viscous monsters.  Dead Space scores some good points with its highly detailed graphics and great HDR and Bloom effects, however there are problems with mouse movement that require you to set mouse sensitivity to max. The Third Person view also tends to detract from the game as there are many times (in small confined spaces) that your visibility is too limited. For testing I ran through the “New Arrivals” Level.  Game settings and image quality links are below.

Here we have a different turn of events as the GTX 260 out runs all of the other by over 38 FPS.
The HD8450 trails in last place here.

FarCry 2:
Nothing beats a good sequel in the gaming world, you get the players of the first game and have the chance for new players of the sequel to go back and buy the first. FarCry2 is that type of game. It has an immersive world that Crytek claims is all one single massive level. That makes the game playable on a new scale. Graphics are well done with a hint over cartoonish characters (their movements are awkward and appear rubbery), combat is not the best as the game lacks a positional damage system; also the enemy AI is not very good. Often the bad guys will just rush you or stand there while you shoot them. For testing I ran the first handful of errands you are sent on (there are no real levels). Game settings and image quality links are below.

The GTX 260 is the winner here again while the HD4850 is once again in last place.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part II}

FallOut 3:
FallOut 3 is not my type of game. Although it looks interesting I found it to be cumbersome, long winded and boring even in heavy combat. It reminds me of Oblivion. Graphically it is only so-so, back ground textures are very good but the third person modeling is not impressive. The models are very small in most settings (reminding me of real time strategy games and not a shooter) making aiming a pain. For testing I ran through DuPont Circle until I reached the tower. Game settings and image quality links are below.

Here we see both nVidia cards out pacing the ATi GPUs.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky:
The Stalker series is a very popular series (although I am not sure why). Graphically is looks overexposed and grainy. The game play is dull with a lot of walking punctuated by very short combat sequences. Enemy AI is good (I actually had them sneaking up on me and circling around behind) so this does make the brief combat enjoyable and challenging. Game settings and image quality links are below.

Stalker is a tight run race with the winners in each category leading by less than 1 FPS.

Left 4 Dead:
Nothing whiles away the mindless hours like killing a horde of mindless Zombies. Well if that is true for you then Left 4 Dead is right up your alley. You are one member in a group of survivors (of a zombie creating infection) that have banded together to … well to survive and kill zombies. Graphically the game is good and gives an overall feel of a horror movie (there is even a film grain adjustment). There are times when you are in pitch darkness and have to rely on your flashlight to see anything at all, this adds to the suspense of the game. Enemy AI is, yep you guessed it, zombie like. There are a few notable exceptions. The hunters are cunning and very fast; their AI takes full advantage of this as they jump around looking to hit you from behind.  I ran through opening “level” of the game until you exit the subway.  Game settings and image quality links are below.

Here the GTX 260 takes the prize while the 9800GTX+ trails in last place.

{mospagebreak title=Value}

Value:
I am not sure how to rate the value here, considering only the mainstream gamer cards were stock (and therefore able to be priced properly) it is difficult to call a clear price/performance winner. The OC’d XFX GTX 260 is clearly the top dog; winning 4 out of the 6 games.  However with a price tag over $300 that takes some wind out if its victory. Granted you do get quite a lot with this card and if you are looking for overclockability and some great extras this is the way to go. In the mainstream category the clear winner is the 9800GTX+.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}

Conclusion:
This holiday season is going to have some interesting games out. They will need some decent power to keep the frames going, nVidia does have that power and the XFX Black Edition GTX 260 more than covers the bill. With the release of the 180.48 drivers we see even more performance pulled out of the 260 and its 216 cores. Both of the nVidian offerings in my testing were the performance leaders in the majority of the games I used. In the end you really won’t go wrong grabbing  a GTX 260 (and the XFX Black Edition in particular) as the performance will cover the price.

In the third installment of our Budget Gamers’ GPU series we have another little gem from Sapphire. This is the HD4830 512MB (DDR3), this card boast almost the same specs as the HD4850 but with a sub $100 price tag. Will this card have the power to find a home in an enthusiasts system?
Read on to find out.

Product: Sapphire Radeon HD4830 512MB DDR3
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: November 20th 2008
Product cost: Under $100 at most etailers
Manufacturer: Sapphire Technologies
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 ships in the same style box we have come to expect from Sapphire. Granted this time we have the official ATi “Ruby” on the front, but otherwise the packaging is the same.
Inside we find the same array of goodies (DVI-D to HDMI) RCA to S-Video etc.

{mospagebreak title=Features and Specifications}
Features and Specifications:
Sapphire’s HD 4830 is the first in the lower-end 4xxx series cards to need additional power. This would seem to hint at greater GPU performance if nothing else. The Cooler on the card is a double height cooler but the tang is only single slot. In fact the 4830 is pretty much a 4850 with a few less shaders.

The official specifications for the Sapphire HD4830 are listed below (take from ATi’s website)
956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
256-bit GDDR3 memory interface
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1
32-bit floating point texture filtering
Indexed cube map arrays
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
640 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
Shader instruction and constant caches
Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
Up to 128 textures per pixel
Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
Early Z test and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
Up to 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing
Accelerated physics processing
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
High performance vertex cache
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
Gamma correct
Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)
All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
OpenGL 2.1 support
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform¹
Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for H.264/AVC, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video formats
High definition (HD) playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD video²
Dual stream (HD+SD) playback support
DirectX Video Acceleration 1.0 & 2.0 support
Support for BD-Live certified applications
Hardware DivX and MPEG-1 video decode acceleration
ATI Avivo Video Post Processor¹
Color space conversion
Chroma subsampling format conversion
Horizontal and vertical scaling
Gamma correction
Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Detail enhancement
Color vibrance and flesh tone correction
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
Bad edit correction
Enhanced DVD upscaling (SD to HD)
Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment
Two independent display controllers
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
Full 30-bit display processing
Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
Hardware cursor
Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920×1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560×1600 (dual-link DVI)³
Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content⁴
Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048×1536
DisplayPort output support
24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560×1600³
HDMI output support
All display resolutions up to 1920×1080³
Integrated HD audio controller with support for stereo and multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including AC-3, AAC, DTS⁵, enabling a plug-and-play audio solution over HDMI
Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
Underscan and overscan compensation
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
VGA mode support on all display outputs
ATI PowerPlay™ Technology⁶
Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
Performance-on-Demand
Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
Clock and memory speed throttling
Voltage switching
Dynamic clock gating
Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology⁷
Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
Integrated compositing engine
High performance dual channel bridge interconnect⁸

{mospagebreak title=Performance}
Performance:
Now I know all of the specs, accessories and features are what you want to read about but I thought I would go ahead and bore you with the usual performance testing just so you know what you will be getting when you drops your cash on this card.

Test system:
Intel QX9770
Asus P5E64 WS Evolution
Sapphire HD 4830 512MB GDDR3
Asus EAH3850 Smart OC (used for base line comparison)
2GB (2x1GB) Kingston DDR 1600 6-6-6-18
Western Digital RaptorX 150GB HDD
Plextor PATA BluRay Drive
CoolerMaster 850Watt PSU (RS-850-EMBA)
Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate
Cyerlink PowerDVD 8 Ultimate (BluRay Playback)
Catalyst 8.11 drivers used for all testing.

BluRay and HD Playback:
I should just go ahead and tell you that ATi has always had the upper hand in GPU to TV out. Ever since they introduced Avivo they have just had this part locked down. The 4830 features two HDCP encoders each with its own on-chip key storage. There is also a built in AMD Xilleon HDTV encoder and a full 7.1 HD Audio encoder for the HDMI out on the card. When you add these up you get quite a nice picture.
All of the BluRay movies and HD TV that I ran through it were perfect.

3DMark Vantage:
Of course I would not be able to keep this test out of a GPU review so here are the scores for both the HD3850 and the HD4830:

Gaming:
For gaming I ran Six recent games (both DX9 and DX10) and compared these to the performance of the HD4650.(being the next in line mid-range GPU). Each game was run through three times and the scores averaged. In cases where I was able to get higher resolutions for game play I have screen shots of the different resolutions for each. Where both GPUs used the same settings I used only one screen shot.
Image quality shots are included for each game. All scores are in Frames Per Second, Higher scores are better.

The Games:
Assassin’s Creed (DX10)
When I ran the HD 4650 tests I found that I had a playable game even though I was under the 30 FPS mark. With the 4830 I saw a whole new ball game Frame rates jumped from the high 20’s on the 4650 and 3850 to over 40. My test run was the first level from the beginning of the Templar attack through to your faked death.

Bioshock:
The HD 4830 makes short work of Bioshock despite the DX10 surfaces. The HD4830 easily outperforms the older HD3850. For testing I ran through the “Welcome to Rapture” level until you enter Medical Pavillion.

Crysis Warhead:
I was not expecting much out of the D4830 while playing Crysis Warhead. This is not due to lack of confidence in the GPU but more due to the way Crysis Warhead renders and its affect on most GPUs.
For testing I ran the “Call Me Ishmael” level until after you take out the road block.

To my surprise I was able to get better resolution out of the 4830 that I was with the 3850. I had fluid full motion game play at 1680×1050 while the HD3850 and 4650 could only manage 1280×1024.

Portal:
Portal was another easy win for the 4830 I imagine that I could get 4x AA out of it and still maintain very playable frame rates. My Portal testing took me through the first six test chambers.

Call of Duty, Modern Warfare:
Call of Duty 4 is pretty scalable and while you can run some fairly high resolutions on it you start to dog down as you add in the eye candy. For testing I ran the “Crew Expendable” from your insertion onto the cargo ship until you open the container with the manifest.

The 4830 was able to handle the full 1920×1200 gaming experience and give me fluid play at 70 FPS.

Spore:
Spore is simply a fun game, due to its “sandbox” style game play you really will get a different game every time you play.  For testing I ran through the whole Cell Stage trying to keep to the same evolutionary choices in each run. The HD 4830 was able to handle Spore at high resolutions without any problems.

{mospagebreak title=Value}
Value:
The HD4830 has recently had a price drop, this means that you can now find this card for under $100 US Dollars. Now there is really nothing else in this price range that has this performance and if you add in a 2^nd one you are still under $200 and have some serious power under your hood. This makes the HD4830 one of the best values out right now.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
The Sapphire HD4830 is an amazing card for its low price. I was very pleasantly surprised at its performance. I was able to run most games maxed out without any performance issues at all and was even able to play Crysis Warhead at an acceptable resolution and settings. The sub-$100 price tag means you can get all of this power without breaking the bank and you can even run multiple GPUs and still be under the prices of the next level up in GPUs.
If you are looking for a good buy in the mainstream gamer price range but want to push for enthusiast performance you would not be wrong to pick up one of two Sapphire HD4830s for your system or as a gift from that gamer you know.

For its great value and performance The Sapphire HD4830 receives our Best on the Planet Award.

  Discussion Link

Not that long ago we took a look at Sapphire’s Radeon HD4550. This turned out to be a nice entry level GPU that would fit perfectly in any HTPC system. Now we have the 4550’s slightly bigger bother the Radeon HD4650 (Over Clocked Edition). Just what will the extra 100 points in the name get you?

Read below to find out.

Product: Sapphire Radeon HD4650 OC Edition 512MB DDR3
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: November 18th 2008
Product cost: $70-95
Manufacturer: Sapphire Technologies
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
As with the HD4550 the HD4605 comes in a small box with Sapphire’s version Ruby on the cover and the usual logos heralding the selling points of the card. The items that will stand out are the OverClock Edition sticker and the 3820×2400 resolution sticker. The OC Edition ships with a stock 50MHz overclock (from 600 to 650MHz) and also features GDDR3 clocked at 900MHz instead of the usual GDDR2 clocked at 1000MHz.
The accessories are the same as we found in the 4550.

{mospagebreak title=Specifications and Features}
Specifications and Features:
The ATi Radeon HD4650 is more than just a step up from the 4550.  ATi really intended for this card to stand out in its price range as it ships with 4 times the stream processors of the 4550 (320 Vs 80). Sapphire’s version bumps the GPU clock up by 50MHz and throws GDDR3 into the mix for better memory scaling.

Other features are shown below:
ATI Radeon HD™ 4600 Series – Key Features

320 Stream Processing Units- Enough power to tackle the most demanding HD games and applications.

Microsoft DirectX® 10.1 – Play today while preparing for tomorrow with state-of-the-art DirectX 10.1 graphics capabilities.

Enhanced Anti-Aliasing (AA) & Anisotropic Filtering (AF) – High performance anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing (4X AA) smooth jagged edges and create true-to-life graphics, for everything from grass to facial features.

ATI CrossFireX™ Technology – Dual mode ATI CrossFireX™ technology offers superior scalability.

PCI Express 2.0 – Support for PCI Express 2.0 will prepare you for bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications.

Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) – UVD 2 frees up your CPU for other tasks so you get The Ultimate Visual Experience™ for the most processing-intensive content. Take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture capabilities.

Upscale Beyond 1080p – Watch the hottest Blu-ray movies or other HD content at full 1080p display resolution¹ and beyond.⁴

Enhanced DVD Upscaling – Watch standard DVD movies in near high-definition quality with DVD upscaling.⁴ The GPU uses post processing algorithms to enhance standard and low resolution videos and movies on your HD display.

Dynamic Contrast – Dynamic Contrast automatically adjusts the contrast and brightness during scenes to consistently deliver a crisp, vibrant picture.

HDMI – Enjoy the latest audio technologies using HDMI with 7.1 digital surround sound support delivering 8-channel audio. Also, xvYCC support allows the user to enjoy a wider range of colors when connected to a capable HDTV.

Integrated DisplayPort technology⁵ with audio

Consumes Less Than 75 Watts under full load – ATI Radeon™ HD 4600 Series graphics cards consume less than 75 watts under full load, eliminating the need for an external power connection and making them easy to install.

Dynamic Power Management – ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series graphics cards feature ATI PowerPlay™ technology, delivering high performance when needed and conserving power when the demand on the graphics processor is low.6

More Performance Per Watt - ATI Radeon HD 4600 series deliver up to 3x the performance per watt of AMD’s previous generation GPUs.⁷

Energy Efficient Manufacturing Process – Second generation 55nm chip uses the industry’s most energy efficient manufacturing process.

{mospagebreak title=Performance}
Performance:
But the proof is in the pudding as they say so let’s see if all f the new features and extra stream processors will do any good or are we looking at just another number increase.

The test system:
Intel QX9770
Asus P5E64 WS Evolution
Sapphire HD 4650 512MB GDDR3 (OC Edition)
Asus EAH3850 Smart OC (used for base line comparison)
2GB (2x1GB) Kingston DDR 1600 6-6-6-18
Western Digital RaptorX 150GB HDD
Plextor PATA BluRay Drive
CoolerMaster 850Watt PSU (RS-850-EMBA)
Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate
Cyerlink PowerDVD 8 Ultimate (BluRay Playback)
Catalyst 8.11 drivers used for all testing.

BluRay and HD TV playback:
As with  the 4550 the HD 4650 handled BluRay and HD payback at 1080i (and 1080p for BluRay) without any issues at all. The quality was excellent with sharp colors and good contrast. The 7.1 sound through the HDMI port was good and did not seem to hinder video playback.

Gaming:
The 4650 is in the sub $100 category of GPUs, and as we saw with the 4550 most GPUs in this realm are not going to cut it with high resolution gaming. Will the 4650 be different?  To find out we used the same games that we used for the 4550 testing and compared it to the same EAH3850 from Asus to see what type of gaming performance we could get out of it.

3DMark Vantage:
Ok, here we see our first indication that the 4650 is more than just another number change. The 4550 gave us 3DMark Vantage scores of less than ½ what the 3850 could do while the 4650 is just over 600 points behind, quite a difference.

HD3850 1GB DDR2	HD4650 OC 512MB GDDR3

Assassin’s Creed (DX10)
The HD4650 is keeping up the pace here as we are just 2 FPS behind the 3850 in our DX10 testing in Assassin’s creed.

Bioshock:
Next up at bat is Bioshock; with the 4550 I had to seriously adjust resolution and image quality to get a playable (frame rate wise) game. With the 4650 I was able to play Bioshock at 1920×1200 with all the eye candy turned up and had frame rates just under my 32FPS mark. The game seemed smooth and quick.

Crysis Warhead (DX10)
One of the hardest games on a system out at the moment Crysis Warhead follows in its older brothers footsteps of making even the hardiest GPU cower and beg at high resolutions.
Here we see that the HD4650 can keep up with the 3850. The Sapphire HD4650 came in less than 1 FPS behind the EAH3850 with 1GB of DDR2 at the same settings.

*note, the settings show 1280×800 for the 3850 however game play ended up shifting to 1280×1024 despite still showing 1280×800 in the settings screen.*

HalfLife 2 Portal:
Portal is a forgiving game as Valve’s engine has always handled rendering differently than most of your heavy handed game developers.

Here we see something very interesting, the HD4650 actually outperforming the HD3850 1GB card at the same resolution and with slightly higher settings (reflect all Vs Reflect World) the HD6450 almost passes the 3850 by almost 26 FPS.

Call of Duty, Modern Warfare:
In Call of Duty 4 we see the HD 4650 running almost as fast as the HD3850 while running at a much higher resolution (the 3850 was at 1680×1050) very impressive indeed.

Spore:
Our last game on the list is Spore, this is a great game and can provide hours of fun. Surprisingly Spore is hard on a GPU. With the 3850 we were able to play at 1920×1200 with most settings on high and receive good frame rates. With the HD 4650 I had to reverse the settings 1920×1200 was viable but I had to set the visual settings to medium for most things.

{mospagebreak title=Value}
Value:
 The Sapphire HD 4650 OC edition will cost you anywhere from $80-$95 which is quite a value for the gaming performance you can get out of it. This card should be on quite a few holiday shopping lists for mainstream and regular gamers looking for a very quick and inexpensive card.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
When I looked at the Sapphire HD4550 I was disappointed in the gaming performance but very pleased with the way it handled HD playback and BluRay. This made the HD 4550 a great value for any HTPC system (in fact I just put a couple in the ones in my house). But now with the HD4650 you can get the same great HD playback AND great gaming. This turns your HTPC into a console gaming station further extending its use and enjoyment. I have swapped out the HD4550 in my living room system for this card and now can enjoy even new titles at good resolutions and great frame rates. The Sapphire HD 4650 OC Edition fills in a neglected area in the GPU market; the High performance Gaming HTPC system. It also fills in the top of the budget/main stream gamer food chain with a very tasty offering indeed.
If you are looking to improve your HTPC gaming experience or just want a lot of graphical power for a little money then go out and grab the Sapphire Radeon  HD 4650 OC Edition.

We are happy to award the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 OC Edition (512MB) both our Best on the Planet award and our HTPC Recommended Hardware awards.
 

Sapphire is a well known name in the world of ATi add-in graphics cards. They have been providing enthusiast, gamers and entry-level users for some time. Recently we took a look at Sapphire’s 4550 an entry level GPU that fits perfectly into an HTPC or a business system. Today, however, we are getting our hands dirty with Sapphire’s new monster the HD 4850 X2. Will this card sit at the right hand of the 4870 X2 or will the new page Prince get booted out of the castle.

Product: Sapphire Radeon HD4850 X2 2GB 
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: October 30th 2008
Product cost: $419.00
Manufacturer: Sapphire Technologies
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The 4850 X2 from Sapphire arrives in a black and red box featuring the ATi hottie Ruby (is that a GPU in your pocket…).  But the eye candy does not stop there as the box is tastefully littered with logos and imagery to show off the performance and features of the card inside.

After you stop ogling the out box and prepare to remove the 4850 X2 inside you will find that Sapphire has done a very good job of protecting the card within by cocooning it in foam. Under all of this protection you will find a fairly nice haul in accessories, including:

CyberLink Power DVD, 3DMark Vantage (Advanced), CyberLink’s DVD suite, a drivers disk and the Ruby ROM (Volume 1.1)
The Ruby Rom is a compilation of games, applications, screensavers and wallpaper all rolled into one easy to ship DVD. The games included with this version are:
Call of Jaurez
Dungeon Runners
Stranglehold
Applications include
EarthSim
Game Shadow

There is  also the usual assortment of power and video adapters thrown in for good measure.
{mospagebreak title=Design and Features}
Design and Features:
The 4850 X2 is, to put it very simply, 2 1GB 4850s in Crossfire on a single card. With two R700’s clocked at 625MHz and massive 2GB (1GB per GPU) of DDR3 to buffer to the 4850 X2 looks to have the “sack” to hold its own in the nasty GPU market.
Additional features provide icing on the cake:
Support for four Dual Link DVI outputs
7.1 surround (through HDMI)
Dedicated HD/BluRay decoder
DX 10.1 support
1600 Stream Processors
230GB/s memory bandwidth

The physical board is laid out with one GPU after the other in line down the board. Sapphire has given each GPU its own heatsink and fan with a “wind tunnel” like pass through for air.
For extra power ATi uses an 8-pin and a 6-pin PCI-e power plug this will give you the extra gas you need to fuel the 4850 X2.

{mospagebreak title=Performance}
Performance:
On November 2^nd Intel lifted the curtain on the new Core i7, this new CPU brings a new level of performance to the computing playground. As such I wanted to show off this newest addition to the ATi family on this latest CPU.  I also wanted to run this against some of the newest (and most demanding) games out.  So I assembled my list, maxed out my settings, and began to play, but I started to wonder (after some single digit frame rates) is the impact on the GPU the resolution or the advanced features and settings? So a added in a second run of testing here I kept the settings maxed out (Except for Crysis and Warhead) but lowered the resolution to 1680×1050 just to see if there would be any gain across the board. Each game tested will show the settings used for both Maxed out and “lo-res” testing. All gaming frame rates were captured in-game using FRAPS.
Image quality shots can be viewed at the links below, they are full screen images for both high and low resolutions. I did not put them in the sections for each game to prevent clutter. There are no image quality shots for the 4850 Crossfire pair as there is no difference between the single HD4850 and the Pair.
Hi-Res
Lo-Res

The test system
Intel Core i7 965
Asus P6T Deluxe
QIMONDA 3 x 1GB DDR3 1067 (Tri Channel)
Seagate Cheetah 147GB 15k RPM SAS Drive
Mushkin 1KW PSU
GIGABYTE GV-R485-512H-B ATi 4850 512MB (2x for Crossfire testing)
Zotac nVidia GTX 280 1GB AMP! Edition
Sapphire HD 4850 X2
All ATi cards were run using Catalyst 8-10 with the hotfix.
The GTX 260 used the 178.24 (these are the currently available non-beta drivers)
Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate was used as the OS for all testing.

The Numbers!  
For the 3DMark Vantage fans out there, here is how these cards stack up running the “High” test run.

In the only synthetic test run for this review; the HD4850 X2 lags behind both the HD4850 Crossfire pair and the GTX 280. I was a little surprised by this as I would have thought the X2 would meet if not exceed the performance of a pair of 4850s in Crossfire. This proved not to be the case although the difference was only 134 points for the GPU score and 137 points over all. The gap between the GTX 280 and the X2 was much larger although the over score difference can also be chalked up to the inclusion of the PhysX software into the nVidia drivers.

The Games:
FarCry2:
FarCry 2 is, as the name implies, the second in the FarCry series. Thankfully it does not use the beleaguered Crytek engine so the game is able to achieve a good image quality/performance ratio.
For testing I ran through the first few “errands” you are sent on by your savior. Settings for both Hi and Lo-res are shown below.

Looks like the tables are turned here. In FarCry 2, under real gaming, the 4850 X2 wins out by just under 10 FPS at max settings and just under 18 at 1680×1050. I also noticed a slight stutter running the GTX 280, the game would seem to render properly then jump a frame or two, it made combat difficult as the enemies pop around the screen.
 

Dead Space:
Dead Space is a new release and one that fits into the Sc-Fi Horror genre. It is a graphically stunning game, with amazing HDR effects.  Although, the third person view and flaky mouse speed do cause some problems during play it is a great game none the less. For testing I ran through the entry level until you finish clearing out the tram path. Settings for both Hi and Lo-res are shown below.

Dead Space is another story. Here the ATi offerings are simply trounced by the nVidia GTX 280 by almost 100 FPS. Game play was actually very smooth on all cards.

 
Crysis (DX10 x64)
If you have not heard about Crysis you are reading the wrong site. Crysis has been praised and damned at the same time (often by the same people). No matter what your opinion of it this game is seriously rough on your system. For testing I ran through the entry (Contact) level until the third beach. Settings for both Hi and Lo-res are shown below.

Although very minor(Less that 5 FPS at maxed out settings) the 4850 X2 still takes the prize for this round and had the smoothest game play.

Crysis Warhead (DX10)
Warhead is the extension of Crysis and takes place on the same island. Although Crytek claims the engine has been optimized there are still complaints that mimic the ones made about Crysis. Again it is one rough game on your system. For testing I ran through the Call me Ishmael level. Settings for both Hi and Lo-res are shown below.

For Warhead gaming at Max settings the 4850 X2 manages a small 4 FPS lead over the rest of the group. The margins for Warhead at 1680×1050 were so close for the top three I do not even know if I would declare one the true winner. I will say that the HD4850 X2 and HD4850 Crossfire pair seemed to be a little smoother during combat where multiple enemies and vehicles (like the fight at the tiki bar) needed to be rendered.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky:
Stalker Clear Sky is another part of the Stalker series and puts you into the shoes of a Stalker once more. Clear Sky boasts an improved AI (although I did not see it) and greatly enhanced graphics (DX 10 support). For my testing I ran through first 4 quests. Settings for both Hi and Lo-res are shown below.

Some very interesting numbers came from our Stalker testing. At Maxed out settings the 4850 X2 and the 4850 Crossfire pair we within 2 FPS of each other while the GTX 280 lagged far behind. Under the lighter load of 1680×1050 gaming we see the Crossfire pair drop back below the GTX 280 and the X2 is out in the lead by over 5 FPS.

Gaming Conclusions:
After gaming with all four sets of cards I found that the X2 seemed to be better at over all game play and rendering smoothness with the exception of Dead Space. In Dead Space all of the cards tested ran very smooth and to be perfectly honest you could use anyone of them and be happy playing the game as in game play was no different between the GPUs used. ATi had a slight edge in rendering HDR effects but you would honestly have to really be looking to tell. In the frames per second race the X2 did win the majority of gaming tests run (again with the exception of Dead Space where the GTX 280 handily won).
Image quality between the cards was also so close that I could not call a clear winner. There are minor “nit-picking” differences in color and textures but overall they all look the same. 

{mospagebreak title=Value}
Value:
The Sapphire Radeon HD 4950 X2 will put a $419.00 dent in your wallet.  Considering the performance increase you should see from the X2 it is a very good price and only $5 more than the GTX 280. Unfortunately this price puts you over the cost of a Crossfire pair of HD 4850s with 512MB ram (running at $170 per car) by about $80 but right around the cost of two 1GB HD 4850s. The single 4850 X2 does have a performance advantage over the crossfire pair especially on boards where the PCI-e lanes are limited to x16 and x4 or two x8 slots.   
{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
Dual GPU cards have been in fashion for some time, the first one to truly show the consumer a performance difference was the old Voodoo 5 5500 Dual GPU where we saw true SLI on a single card.
Although both nVidia and ATi have released cards since many (with the notable exception of the 9800 GX2) have failed to really give a good performance lead over a pair of cards or in some cases a single card. With the 4870 X2 ATi finally got the formula right, and they have applied this same framework to the 4850 X2 and we see a great single card GPU solution at a great price and gives AMD a nice place to sit owning both of the top single card performance slots. Sapphire’s implementation of this card fits right in and gives the enthusiast and gamer with a budget the chance to get in on the high performance action while not breaking the bank. In game performance was excellent and even tackled GPU killers like Crysis and Warhead very well out running nVidia’s top end GTX 280 in the majority of our testing.  It looks like the Page Prince of GPUs will be able to take its place by the HD4870 X2 King’s side and should also find a place in your system. 

For the newest category here (the Value Enthusiast Class) we are happy to give the Sapphire Radeon HD4850 X2 our Best on the Planet Award.

Discussion Link

Sapphire Technology (from this point forward called Sapphire) is a company with a reputation for making high quality ATi (AMD) based products, from their Toxic line of enthusiast cards to their mainboards and multimedia devices. While we have not had much to do with them, we have reviewed one of their products in the past. We found it to be good quality but under powered for the market it was aimed at.
Today, making its second debut on Planetx64.com we see a new product from Sapphire. As with last time, this is an entry level card the HD4550. Will we have a similar experience as last time? Or will this new card, based on ATi’s significantly improved GPU, wow us like the last one did not.

Product: Sapphire HD 4550  
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: October 10th 2008
Product cost: $59.99 (at Newegg.com)
Manufacturer: Sapphire Technologies
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The Sapphire HD4550 came in a rather small box, but was still well laid out with information and had the obligatory illustration of a hot female, this one bearing a startling resemblance to Sarah Connor from Terminator 2…
The one thing that struck me as odd was the “Prepare to Dominate” tag on the front of the box.
Now correct me if I am wrong but the 4550 is a mid-range entry level (confusing huh?) GPU. It is not really meant to dominate anything but its price range. But hey I guess you have to have something to catch the consumer’s eye. Speaking of catching the eye, one item that will draw notice is the 7.1 sound through HDMI that this card offers as well as the HDMI and Crossfire X Support.

Opening up the box I found a decent cache of goodies including both a DVI-A to VGA and a DVI-D to HDMI adapter. There was also Video out cable and an S-Video to component converter. There is also a half-height tang that, if you remove the VGA port) will allow you to install the Sapphire HD4550 into a 2U sized HTPC case.
A Driver CD and Instruction booklet were also thrown in.
The Driver CD is important as (as of this writing) the available drivers from ATi’s website do not support the 4550.

{mospagebreak title=Specifications and Features}
Specifications and Features:
Taken straight from Sapphire’s website the HD 4550 has the following specifications:
I/O Output: VGA+DL-DVI-I+HDTV
Core Clock: 600 MHz & 80 Stream Processors
Memory Clock: 900MHz, 1800 Mbps.
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
512MB /64bit DDR3 memory interface
Single Slot Active Cooler
HDMI compliant via dongle
7.1 Audio Channel Support
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1 support

Now on paper this looks good but, as I and others have found, in practice many of these items just do not pan out.

As a low cost card the HD4550 it not loaded up with a ton of extras but does have a good range of them.
The following are also taken from the Sapphire site.
Upscale Beyond 1080p
Watch the hottest Blu-ray movies or other HD content at full 1080p display resolution and beyond.1

Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2)
UVD 2 frees up your CPU for other tasks so you get The Ultimate Visual Experience™ for the most processing- intensive content. Take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture capabilities.

Enhanced DVD Upscaling
Watch standard DVD movies in near high-definition quality with DVD upscaling.2 The GPU uses post processing algorithms to enhance standard and low resolution videos and movies on your HD display.

HDMI
Enjoy the latest audio technologies using HDMI with 7.1 digital surround sound support. Also, xvYCC support allows the user to enjoy a wider range of color when connected to a capable HDTV.

Consumes less than 25 watts under full load
The ATI Radeon™ HD 4550 graphics card consumes less than 25 watts under full load, making it the ideal choice for implementation across a large diverse install base of desktop PCs.

Dynamic Power Management
ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics card features ATI PowerPlay™ technology, delivering high performance when needed and conserving power when the demand on the graphics processor is low.1

Energy Efficient Manufacturing Process
Second generation 55nm chip uses the industry’s most energy efficient manufacturing process.

Stability & Reliability
AMD’s award-winning ATI Catalyst™ graphics software and drivers deliver unprecedented graphics stability and reliability.

The HD4550 also supports Crossfire (as mentioned above) the one thing that sticks out is that there are no interconnects, but that is not a deterrent, it is simply that the HD4550 does not need any to run Crossfire. You can pair up these cards and still get the Crossfire boost from them.

Again things are looking good considering this cards price and market point.

{mospagebreak title=Performance I}
Performance:
When I first planned my testing of the HD4550 I was going to use an entry level system similar to what I thought this card might find its way into. However part of the way through I began to think that I might be selling the card short by doing that. Instead I setup a system that would not hinder the HD4550. So what you should see if the full potential of the GPU, that having been said if you place this in a lower powered system your results might not match what you see here but they should not be far off.
I used an HD3850 not as a direct comparison but as a baseline comparison. The HD3850 represents last generation’s mid-range GPU, by using this we can see how close the new entry level comes to that mid range performance level.

Test System
Intel QX9770
Asus P5E64 WS Evolution
Sapphire HD 4550 512MB
Asus EAH3850 Smart OC (used for base line comparison)
2GB (2x1GB) Kingston DDR 1600 6-6-6-18
Western Digital RaptorX 150GB HDD
Plextor PATA BluRay Drive
CoolerMaster 850Watt PSU (RS-850-EMBA)
Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate
Cyerlink PowerDVD 8 Ultimate (BluRay Playback)
Catalyst Control Center and Drivers used for the Asus HD3850 Drivers from the CD-Rom used for the HD4550.

BluRay and HD playback:
To kick things off I threw in a few BluRay movies and watched them through both DVI-D and HDMI.
I was not overly surprised by the outstanding playback quality of my BluRay Movies and the reproduction of my HD-TV signal (Over the Air HD).

Gaming:
Now as an entry level card most people would not expect any kind of noteworthy gaming performance from the HD4550. But I still wanted to see how it would handle gaming including DX10 games.

3DMark Vantage:
Of course I would throw in the 3DMark Vantage numbers as it is just about the only DX10 gaming synthetic benchmark available.

The numbers here are not very reassuring and are less than ½ what the 3850 was able to achieve.

Assassin’s Creed (DX10)
For our first test of the HD4550’s ability to game we have a DX10 title up on the block.

To achieve an average frame rate of 28 FPS on the 3850 I could run at 1920×1200 with good image quality settings, to achieve a barely playable game with the HD4550 I had to back the settings down quite a bit. Resolution was down to 1440×900, Level of detail and Graphic Quality dropped 2, and post processing was turned off. Even with this reduction we only managed to maintain 22 FPS, but the game only felt sluggish in a few spots. 1440×900 did not look good on the 24” monitor I was using for testing but on a 22” or 19” it would look pretty good. Assassin’s Creed gets a playable rating for the HD4550.

BioShock:
Another DX10 game, Bioshock is not incredibly hard on a system but it does need some power to run properly.

Again as you can see I had to reduce the resolution down to 1440×900 for the HD4550 to maintain a base playability level. If you have a smaller LCD panel this resolution will look very good so Bioshock is a title that will work on the HD4550.

Mercenaries 2 World on Fire:
What an awful game, I decided to pick this one up for testing as it looked like it might have some decent graphics, but even at max settings things looked bad. (Overdone bloom effects are my favorite).

Mercenaries 2 3850	Mercenaries 2 4550

No matter the terrible quality the HD4550 had to be drastically reduced to achieve a playable frame rate. Image quality suffered quite a bit so I do not think you would be happy playing this game on the HD4550

{mospagebreak title=Performance II}
Crysis Warhead:
I am pretty sure you were not expecting to see this one included in a review of an entry level GPU. Well I threw it in considering the DX10.1 support from the HD4550 just to see what we would get.

I was surprised. I could get a fairly high resolution (1280×800) with low (minimum) image quality setting all with very playable frame rates. By comparison the 3850 could not handle the mainstream settings even at 1027×768 very well. Switching to minimum IQ settings I was able to push up to 1440×900 and maintain playable levels on the 3850. Even Crysis Warhead gets a playable rating on the HD4550.

Portal:
Portal is based off of Valves well written engine and as such can be run at high resolutions without the need for top of the line GPUs.

As you can see I was able to play Portal at up to 1680×1050 with 2x MSAA, the game was smooth and image quality was good, but this is in contrast to 1920×1200 with 2x MSAA on the HD 3850. Portal is another title in the Playable column for the HD4550.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare:
A great action game Call of Duty Modern Warfare features good character models as well as great textures.

The HD4550 struggled a bit here, although I was able to achieve playable frame rates at 1680×1050 this came at the cost of no AA, raged lines were very visible.  AA in Call of Duty was not available to the HD4550 until I reached 1024×768; at this resolution the image quality was so poor that I could not see anyone running the game at that setting. Call of Duty Modern Warfare was marginally playable on the HD4550 but only due to image quality due to the lack of AA.

Spore:
Spore is a fairly new game and one that is very popular. I can see Spore being played on entry level systems as more and more mainstream and entry level users are sucked into its addictive world.

I was very surprised at how much of an impact Spore had on my hardware. The 3850 was barely able to keep up at 1920×1200 (of course most Spore gaming will be done at much lower resolutions.) For the HD4550 I was able to hit 24 FPS with a resolution of 1440×900 but found the game to be very playable at that setting. I imagine that you could run it at 1280×1024 and have frame rates of 30+.

So it looks like Spore will also be added to the playable column for the HD4550.

{mospagebreak title=Value}
Value:
The Sapphire Radeon HD4550 will only make a small dent in your wallet, coming in at a very reasonable $59.99. This is a very nice cost considering the features and performance I was able to get out of it.
Even if you are only looking to drop this into an HTPC you are going to get your money’s worth from it.

Sapphire offers a 2 year warranty on its Graphics cards. You will have to deal with the place you bought the card for all RMA service the warranty is not transferable and will require proof of purchase (from the place you bought it)

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
The Sapphire HD4550 is not a gamers card; if you are looking to run high resolution games or push a 30” monitor at max res you are looking in the wrong place. The HD4550 is a great entry level card. I was surprise that only one game was not playable out of the ones that I chose, I was expecting terrible gaming performance and poor image quality but that was not the case.  HTPC performance was great with no image quality or performance issues from BluRay or HD playback. You also get great flexibility, with the low cost you could pick up multiple cards and run them in Crossfire or you could conceivably drop this card into an ATi 780G or 780GX board run hybrid Crossfire without breaking the bank. While you won’t be floored by the speed and power of the HD4550 it is a great and cost effective card that would fit perfectly in an HTPC or entry level gaming system.

The Sapphire HD4550 gets our "HTPC Recommended Hardware" stamp of approval

Product:  Multiple Products
Author: Sean Kalinich
Category: Gamer 
Reviewed on: July 20th 2008
Spelling and Grammatical Editors: Planetx64 Staff

Discussion Link

{mospagebreak title=The Market}
What is the point?

This is a question that many people are asking today. Why do I need to replace my existing GPU for a new one? “The games I like to play run great.” In the eyes of the mainstream gamer the top of the heap does not hold much more than a resigned sigh or a small shake of the head. To the ultra elite gamer or enthusiast that just HAS to have the highest 3DMark number they want at least one and are willing o pay for it. The question many wonder is why is there such a big range in thought?

Psychology of gaming:
As the title implies I am going to embark on a brief explanation as to why I think our market is driven the way it is. To do this I will have to cover some background facts and principles behind what makes a game “fluid” and playable.
The first concept we cover is: full fluid motion
Full Fluid Motion is described as the speed (in FPS) where video (and games) appear to the human eye as matching what we expect from real life motion.  Now there are many schools of thought as to what this magic number is but most put it at 24(1) FPS for film (traditional movies) and 32-36 for digital. But there are variances in this, these are all centered on another item; Refresh Rate.  
Refresh Rate is the speed (measured in Hz) that a monitor or light refreshes or strobes, for most new movies (in theaters) and TVs it is 60Hz (for US and 50Hz for most of Europe) for analog and roughly 72 Hz for Digital (Not all HD sets will run at 72Hz some still use the 60Hz standard). For Monitors (including LCD) this is usually set to 72Hz with the ability to alter it within a set range depending on resolution. Older monitors had a set refresh at 62-65Hz. This causes the strobe or pulsing effect you see on many old monitors and TVs.

The Full Fluid Motion rating is affected by Refresh Rate in that a higher Refresh Rate can fool the eye into perceiving something as fluid that might fall below the technical level, while a lower Refresh Rate might make a high frame rate appear to stutter.  This is why you will see an option in many games to sync your vertical refresh. It eliminates the refresh rate getting out of sync with the rendering of frames and causing texture tearing. So now we see that in technical terms there are two very important numbers Full Fluid Motion (32-36) and refresh (commonly 72Hz) This covers the basics now let’s talk about how this affects gaming specifically.

The next item is more subjective, in fact it is entirely subjective. That is perceived motion. In other words what do you as the game player/ video watcher see? To one person 32FPS might be very fast while to someone else it might be so slow as to be unplayable.  This is based on perception and our notions of what makes a good gaming experience.

Here is where it gets tricky, we know that Full Fluid Motion is roughly 36FPS and that refresh should be at 72Hz to maintain this, but what do we know about each person’s experience? If you become used to one thing would you know to be frustrated with it?
For example If I limit you to running all of your games at 15 FPS and then expose you to 30FPS this new experience will dazzle you. Your gaming experience and perception does not even match what we technically consider Full Fluid Motion, yet you are happy with this amazing leap in performance.
At the upper end it is a little different. Here we base our experience on perceived performance. Your eyes cannot tell the difference between 50 FPS and 70 FPS but in the days of the bench mark we know that one is faster than the other. Higher FPS= better performance right? Well yes and No, to be blunt the human eye is not capable of registering much over 32 FPS in video or gaming. Yet we perceive that if I can get one or two more FPS I am doing better!  This is a great marketing strategy that has worked for a long time and has us by the short and curlies. We happily shell out more and more money for new GPUs in the hope for another 500 points in 3DMark or an extra 10 FPS that our eyes cannot register.
To me this is simply wrong.  So how does this play into what I am talking about?

Well it is very simple to the mainstream gamer who only wants to play his games getting 32-36 FPS in any game is simply good enough. They question become which GPU will give me this for the best price?
We can add to this short and uncomplicated list Power Efficiency and Heat. The Guy/Girl that HAS to have the highest numbers will always shell out more and more for the next fastest product but to the majority (the casual gamer and prosumer) Those cards are almost laughable in their cost, power and size.

Now that I have bored you with my over simplified version of how people view games (and I know this does not cover all aspects and is by no means complete) I will take a look at four GPUs that are still considered current. The ATi 3850 and 4850 and the nVidia 8800GTX and 9800GTX, I will be testing these based on their ability to meet the 32-26 FPS mark using the least amount of power and producing the least amount of heat. 

(1)This is the speed that most films are recorded at, however with the move to more theatrical movies being shot on full digital media (HDD) there is some controversy about this number.
With current 24 FPS films to be converted to “video” a 3:2 pull down is used to correct issues between the speed the movie was filmed at and the refresh the TV will display (60 or 50Hz) if your refresh rate is a multiple of the film speed (i.e 48Hz or 72Hz) you do not need this Pull Down to correct discrepancies in playback. These topics are beyond the scope of this article and will not be discussed in detail.

{mospagebreak title=Testing and Test Systems I}
The Subjects:
The test systems are going to be static. I will have one Intel System to use for this testing. In order to rule out possible system issues I am going to use the fastest CPU that I have on hand, the QX9770.  System specs are shown below.

Asus EAH3850 Smart OC:
This card, is based off of the ATi 3850 GPU but instead of the 512MB of GDDR3 on most models Asus have chosen to drop a hefty 1GB of Fast DDR2 memory as well as an oversized GPU cooler (making this card a double height card) and a large heatsink for the power regulators. This card features PCI-e 2.0 support, dual dual-link DVI ports, CrossfireX support, an A/V out port and comes complete with a DVI to HDMI converter (the EAH3850 Smart OC supports HDCP). The software bundle is also very nice and includes Asus’ own splendid software for color correction and control, Game OSD for real-time overclocking and in game benchmarking and capture, Video Security a software for home security (requires a web or IP camera), and SmartDoctor which is described as an overclocking and hardware protection tool But these features are not what makes the EAH3850 Smart OC stand out. What makes the EAH3850 Smart OC stand out is the Smart OC button, this small button on the I/O plate (or tang) instantly sends more voltage to the card for overclocking it does not actually change the clocks itself. With this extra voltage you can get these cards quite high on Core and Memory Clocks. The Smart OC button also turns on a red LED that shines through the DVI ports adding to the visual appeal of these cards (if you are looking at the back of the case).

GIGABYTE GV-R485-512H-B ATi 4850 512MB
Our second entrant from ATi/AMD is the 4850. This pair of cards hails from GIGABYTE and is a purple and red explosion of color and graphical power. The 4850 arrives with support for PCI-e 2.0, DX 10.1, OpenGL 2.1, HDCP.  The GV-R485-512H-B features dual dual-link DVI-I, HDMI support (with an adapter included), a 55nm die, 512MB of GDDR3, with a 256bit memory interface. Full shadermodel 4.1 support, CrossfireX support, is ROHS compliant and is just plain fast. The 4850 is also a single slot card allowing for the very real possibility of Quad Crossfire using these cards on the right system. The software bundle is not as good as on the Asus and the fan can get very loud under heavy gaming but in all this offering from GIGABYTE is a nice one.

{mospagebreak title=Testing and Test Systems II}
Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-ON 8800GTX 768MB
Since we have already review the Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-ON 8800GTX 768MB in the past I will not go into detail but will link the review if you are interested in the cards features.

Foxconn 9800GTX.
Our second nVidian entry is also from Foxconn (being one of the few vendors that will actually send nVidia products our way, Thank you Foxconn!)
The 9800GTX is a monster of a card, it is even longer than the 8800GTX. This makes for some interesting installation situations if you do not measure your case properly. There are also issues on many mainboards as the length of the card interferes with PATA and SATA ports on a few.
The plastic fan shroud runs the full length of the card and to be perfectly honest makes the 9800GTX look very cheesy, and cheap.
Despite the length and looks of the card the 9800GTX boast some eye turning specs.  The 9800GTX has support for DX 10, Shadermodel 4.0, OpenGL 2, HDCP support (through DVI-I), comes with some very fast (2200MHz) GDDR3, and many others. The bundle that comes with the Foxconn 9800GTX is nothing to be amazed at and simply includes 2x DVI-I to VGA adapters, 2 power adapters (4-pin Molex to 6-Pin PCI-e), Drivers and utilities CD-ROMs. One thing to note is that the 9800GTX like the 8800 requires two 6-pin PCI-e power connections. The ATi 3850 and 4850 require only one per card.

{mospagebreak title=The Tests}
The tests:
For testing a picked out 6 full games and one demo this was in addition to 3DMark Vantage (for the numbers people) Each game was run through the selected level 3 times and the average of the minimum, Maximum and Average frame rate were used for final scoring. The game settings and level used will be listed with each game. All screen shots and frame rate recordings were done using FRAPS.

{mospagebreak title=Power and Heat}
Power consumption was tested using a P9 Kill A Watt this was attached to the AC cord then plugged into the wall. Power consumption testing was done for the whole system; no locks were used to determine GPU power consumption alone. The reasoning behind this is that when you drop in a new GPU your overall system power consumption is going to change. We looked at the idle power usage in terms of wattage draw from the wall then we ran 3DMark Vantage and observed the power draw for the GPU tests only. This was then averaged into a single wattage draw number listed for each GPU. For gaming we tested in each game after 30 minutes of gaming.  These scores were also averaged for a single wattage draw result. We then looked at the delta between the two to determine the power efficiency. This was not meant to be a complete method for testing power draw but is s fairly effective way to determine what a GPUs effect on power draw will be on a given system.  As with all reviews remember that these results are not all encompassing, they show power draw as it occurred in my lab and with my test system setup, your results may be different.

Heat:
Heat or more to the point heat dissipation plays a big role on efficient performance. If your system produces more heat than it can dissipate then you may begin to get sluggish performance. One of the leading heat producers in any system is the GPU. This is why so many companies have begun to put double height coolers massive shrouds, etc on their cards. It is with the intent of getting that heat out of the system (as if you did not already know that). But even with this you still get ambient heat from the card, this is what helped me develop our testing method. For idle temperatures I used a Fluke Laser thermometer. I read temps from the center of the heatsink as well as the back of the card. Measurements were taken while idle, during gaming and while running Cinebench’s OpenGL test.  This produced a good range for Idle and load temperatures.  For Crossfire setups I took a reading of the ambient temperature between the two cards in addition to the heatsink and back readings.
A foreword on these readings for ease of testing I used an open stand (HSPC test station) this means there was constant air movement around the cards, your temperatures may vary with your cases and their air flow patterns.

We saw some interesting numbers here. The double height coolers on the nVidia cards tend to pay off, as the higher clocked GTX parts still managed to run cooler under load than the ATi cards. Even the older 3850 has trouble keeping cool during gaming. When the cards were idling the winner here was the 3850 Smart OC with an average temp of 34c. For cooling efficiency the 8800GTX wins as the delta between idle and load was 9 degrees.
Ambient room temp was between 24-27c during power and heat testing

{mospagebreak title=Performance I}
The Games and Applications:

3DMark Vantage:
I threw this one in as a baseline test, it is a synthetic and not representative of real world gaming (which has to deal with sound, AI and other calculations) it is a good test of system potential.

Although I am sure it is no surprise that the 4850 won out for single card performance, what I find shocking is that the 8800GTX actually beat the 9800GTX by over 350 points.  The only reason I can think of for this is the extra memory in the 8800GTX. As expected Crossfire shows a healthy boost to the scores for both the 3850 and the 4850 while the 3850’s magic SmartOC button showed a large gain in only single card mode.

Mass Effect:
Mass Effect is one of two Third Person games that I used for this evaluation. It is a game very much like the Knights of the Old Republic series in terms of look and game play. For testing I ran the Eden level from you drop off onto the planet until your return to the ship. Settings and image quality comparison are shown below.

In Mass Effect, for single card average performance the 8800GTX is the winner by a little over a frame per second. The 4850 followed close behind by roughly 3 FPS. Now for minimum frame rate (single card) the 4850 was the winner by a single frame per second.  For multi-card performance the 4850 in Crossfire is the winner by a mile out performing everything by over 10 FPS in average performance and 17 FPS in minimum performance. Interestingly the 3850 in Crossfire was only able to squeak by the 4850 in single card mode.  For our first run we find that only the 3850 at stock speed is unable to meet our full fluid motion standard of 32 FPS.

Bioshock.
The first of our DX10 games is Bioshock. This game is from Looking Glass Studios and in terms of game play there is very little like it. The game offers the player a wide range of choices. Graphically the game developers used some DX10 textures for water effects and lighting but on the whole you are seeing mostly DX9. For testing I used the welcome to rapture level up until you enter the 2^nd bathosphere.
Settings and Image quality shots are below.

Score another win for the GIGABYTE 4850 in single card mode for average frame rate and a tie for minimum frame rate. For multi-card performance I was shocked, the 3850 Smart OC won out easily over everything else with an average frame rate of 72 although minimum frame rate was taken by the 4850s in Crossfire. The 3850 in single card, stock mode was not able to meet our full fluid motion standard but was not too far under it.

Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare:
The Call of Duty series have always been fun games that challenge players in a number of ways. Call of Duty 4 is a no exception, with good character models, particle effects and some interesting lighting Call of Duty Modern Warfare can slow down your GPU.  For testing I ran the “Crew Expendable” level from beginning to completion. Image quality comparison and settings are shown below.

The 4850 manages to eek out a victory by less than 1 FPS, however for minimum frame rate there is no question, the 4850 comes in at 62 FPS while the 9800GTX shows 59. For Multi-card performance the 4850 pair takes this one with no effort.  For Call of Duty 4 only the stock 3850 did not make the cut for full fluid motion.

{mospagebreak title=Performance II}
Assassins Creed (DX10)
This title from Ubisoft has managed to grab more headlines for what has been done to it than what it does. I ran Assassin’s creed in its original installed form for testing here, no patches were applied. The level I used was the beginning level up to your execution. Image quality comparison and settings are shown below.

I am sure it came as no surprise to see the 4850 win again in both single and multi-card modes. This was for average and minimum frame rates. Full fluid motion was achieved by all of the cards but the 3850 in single card mode.  Perhaps with a little overclock this card would be fitting for your Assassins Creed fix.

GRID (Demo)
From Codemasters GRiD is our only other third person game and is a pretty graphically intense game.
The smoke and dust effects as well as the in game physics can seriously slow you down. Image quality comparison and settings are shown below.

Here is another big win for the 4850. The 3850, while it did not do bad, was not able to meet our full fluid motion standard of 32 FPS. I do think that with a little overclocking (made easier by the Smart OC button) it would be able to both in single card mode and in Crossfire.

Crysis- x64:
Although I am not a fan of this game I will not deny the impact it has on a system and a GPU. For testing I used the Deactivate GPS Jammer level and ran until after the fire fight on the 2^nd beach. Image quality comparison and setting are below.

I was shocked that the 9800GTX came out on top here. It even outperformed the 4850s in Crossfire.
As far as our Full Fluid motion standard only the 9800GTX, the 4850 single and the 4850 in Crossfire was able to meet or exceed the 32 FPS mark. Meaning if Crysis is your thing these would be the cards for you to look at.

HalfLife 2 Episode 2
The HalfLife Series is still one of the best games ever written; graphically they might not be at the same level as Assassin’s Creed or Crysis (although their engine is more efficient than either). HalfLife still requires some power to run at very high resolutions and with all settings maxed out.  For testing I used the “This Vortal Coil” level and played through all of the Ant Lion attacks. Image quality comparison and settings are shown below.

The 4850 from GIGABYTE wins out again, although, the Asus 3850 performs quite well for an older generation card. All of the cards we tested met the full fluid motion standard we set so any of these would be perfect for HalfLife2 gaming.

{mospagebreak title=Value}
Price/Warranty:
The Asus EAH3850 Smart OC will set you back about $150 making a pair of these a very reasonable $300. Warranty is a standard three year warranty on defects in manufacture.

The GIGABYTE GV-R485-512H-B runs around $179.99 although you can find them for as low as $150. This makes about $360 for a pair of these. That is not bad at all considering the performance they exhibited.
Warranty information can be found on GIGABYTE’s web site

Foxconn 9800GTX this card can be found around the Internet for about $210.00

Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-ON 8800GTX 768MB, although we have reviewed this card before the prices have changed so we will list the current pricing here, it looks like the Foxconn 8800GTX can be picked up for about $250.

Foxconn warranty information can be found on Foxconn’s site.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusions}
Conclusion:
Performance
Looking at the results it is easy to declare a winner for fastest card. The 4850 from GIGABYTE is simply the fastest single card solution and a pair of them is amazingly quick. But does everyone want or need that high of a frame rate? For the most part all of the cards (with the exception of the Stock EAH3850 Smart OC and the game Crysis) were able to surpass the 32 FPS we were looking for.  This means that anyone of these cards would work for most people.  If all you want s good looking full motion gaming at a reasonable price, the Asus EAH3850 Smart OC is probably the best card for you. With the Asus 3850 Smart OC you can use the smart OC utility to gain a few extra FPS in the few games where stock speed just won’t cut it. If, on the other hand, you are looking for the fastest gaming experience you can get then the GIGABYTE GV-R485-512H-B in crossfire is what you are looking for. If Crysis is your bag, the 9800GTX is the right card for you.
If you are looking for the middle of the road then either the Asus 3850 or the single 4850 will fit the bill.

Heat and Power: None of these cards sip power or are what you would call “cool”. But there are some that stand out while others fail. If you are power conscious and looking for the best performance you might consider than the Asus EAH3850 Smart OC running in Crossfire (at stock) uses less power than a single 4850 while generating the same amount of heat.  These same two cards put up some impressive frame rates, but they do cost more than a single 4850.

Final Thoughts:
Although this is setup as a competitive evaluation, this was not really the intent. What I wanted to show is that there are compromises with each choice we make in terms of computer components. I also wanted to demonstrate that the market image that once a new product comes out, the old one is obsolete is not true. The Asus 3850 did not perform faster than the other cards but in most cases it performed more than well enough to work for the mainstream gamer. We also saw that in many cases the older 8800GTX outperformed the newer 9800GTX, in the end my hope is that this article will give you the information to make the best choice for your needs if any of these cards are on your list.

I know that many of you will be asking me "Why didn’t you have the 200 series cards from nVidia?" well the simple truth is that the site has been unable to get one from ANY manufacturer. It would seem that nVidia’s threat to "cut me off" has worked with regards to their current products. As I write for this site on a voluntary basis and will not spend my money on a company that acts like that the current gen nVidia products will remain abesnt until this changes.

Discussion Link

Asus has been known for years for their motherboards.  Over the past few years they have really made a push on the graphics card market. Unlike many other companies they have also decided to make graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia; rather then just siding with one chipset.  Today we have a slightly unusual video card package to look at. Inside the box there is a 5.5” front panel control used for real time overclocking of the video card along with several other features.

Reviewer: Jason Hambly
Date: November 1, 2007
Manufacturer: Asus
Supplied By: Asus
Model: 8600GT OC Gear
Price: $144.99
Grammatical and Spelling Editor: PlanetX64 Staff

Specifications and Features

Graphics Engine -GeForce 8600GT
Video Memory -256MB DDR3
Engine Clock -540MHz
Memory Clock -1.4GHz (700MHz DDR3)
Memory Interface -128-bit
Max Resolution -2048×1536
Bus Standard -PCI Express X16
VGA Output -YES, via DVI to VGA Adapter
HDTV Output -YES, via HDTV Out cable
TV Output -YES, via S-Video to Composite
DVI Output -DVI-I
Dual DVI Output -YES
Adaptor/Cable bundled – DVI to VGA adapter / HDTV-out cable
Software Bundled – ASUS Utilities & Driver

ASUS Features

Superior Cooling Efficiency – 14°C cooler than reference design boards!

Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista™

ASUS Splendid:  Watching movies on PC is as good as on Top-of-the-line consumer television (under winXP/2000)

ASUS Video Security Online:  Keep an eye on your home at all times no matter where you are

ASUS Game LiveShow:  Stream live gaming action onto the internet and share with other gaming enthusiast

ASUS Game Replay:  Recording gaming action and strategy into MPEG4 files to share with other gaming enthusiast

ASUS Game FaceMessenger:  Easy IM and live game conference in any PC games (under winXP/2000)

ASUS Gamer OSD:  Chat and overclocking during games

Graphics GPU Features

NVIDIA® GeForce 8600GT

Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista™

NVIDIA SLI™ Technology ready

Full support for Microsoft DirectX10 and Shader Model 4.0 enables stunning and complex special effects

OpenGL®2.0 support

NVIDIA Quantum Technology – Advanced Shader Processors architected for physics computation

{mospagebreak title=Overview}

Overview

The day the card arrived the delivery person was carrying such a large box that I figured Asus must have sent me a pair of cards for SLI testing instead of the single card I was expecting.  So I quickly opened up the box and was greeted by the largest video card box I have ever seen.  It is bigger then most of the motherboard boxes. The box is covered with info on the card and features of the OCGear front panel controller. The front flap of the box lifts up to show even more pictures and specs.  But enough with the box its time to see what was inside.

Inside the outer box is another heavier box which contains the goodies. Everything is protected by thick foam.  The space in the foam for the video card was much larger then the card itself leading me to believe the same packaging is used for different models.

Contents

- Asus 8600GT video card
- 5 ¼ “ Front panel controller
- D-Sub to DVI Dongle
- HDTV Out Cable
- Manuals
- Driver and Software CDs
- CD Case

  

 

The video card is built around a sharp blue colored PCB and is much shorter than its big brother the 8800.  Cooling the 8600GT is a open style copper heatsink fan.  There are no heat sinks on the memory chips.  Dual DVI outputs combined with a HDTV out are pretty much standard these days.  This card is also SLI ready if you were to pick up a second one.

The front panel controller is designed into a strange shape.  One side has a long narrow piece extending back; this is to allow you to mount it securely in an open bay in your case.  The rest of the controller I assume is just large enough to enclose the inner workings of it.  The front face that you will spend your time looking at has a very glossy finish and is almost like a mirror when looking at it straight on.  The knob is the only moving external part on the controller and works as a dial and a button.  The panel connects to the computer through an open USB header on the motherboard.

{mospagebreak title=Performance: Game Tests}
Performance

To test the performance of the card we ran it through a series of game tests followed up by a run of 3DMark06.  All settings were adjusted in game and increased to find a maximum setting while still allowing the game to be very playable.

Test System:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
eVGA nForce 680i SLI
2 GB Crucial Ballastix PC2 8500
2x Seagate 7200.9 80GB SATA3G in RAID 0
Mushkin 650w PSU

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

In Half-Life 2: Lost Coast frame rates were recorded using FRAPS from the time you go through the gate at the bottom until you get into the room at the top where you jam the elevator type machine.

Call of Duty 2

In Call of Duty 2 I used the second part of the Winter War level called Domination.  This level has some indoors and outdoors parts to the level so it gives you a good feeling of how the game will play. Settings were; 4xAA, Anisotropic filtering.

FPS, higher is better.

Battlefield 2

To test Battlefield 2 I used the Daquing Oilfields level on single player to get an idea of the performance. Settings were on High and then the resolution increased to 1280×1024 which was the maximum it would allow me to go with my widescreen LCD monitor.  Unfortunately the Battlefield series continues to not support widescreen resolutions.

 

3DMark06

The standard 3DMark06 test were run to get the following scores.

Overclocking:

Since this card comes with its own overclocking device, all overclocking was done using the front panel controller rather than software that would usually be used. This did limit the overclocking to only the GPU core because the controller does not increase memory speed.

Temperatures:

The Asus 8600GT ran at very reasonable temperatures.  Using the front panel controller to adjust the card from max fan speed to min fan speed and GPU from max to min, tests were rerun at each setting to get an overall range of temperatures that you could expect the card to run at.

{mospagebreak title=Price/Conclusion}
Price and Warranty:

The Asus 8600GT OCGear edition is available online for $144.99 from Newegg.com.

Asus offers a 3 year limited warranty on their VGA cards.

Conclusion:
The Asus 8600GT OC Gear card offers great performance at a very reasonable price.  There were no issues playing all of our test games at high resolutions and still maintaining playable frame rates.  However, if you were to take a jump to 1920×1080 there would probably be a very noticeable drop in performance.  With a street price of under $150 adding a second 8600GT would be pretty easy on the pocket book and the extra frame rate would certainly give you a jump on fragging your buddies.  With such a small sized card offering strong performance, this would make an excellent HTPC addition, especially since it runs very quietly.  If anyone is looking for a great midrange card with a good price they should check out the Asus 8600GT.

Pros:
-Inexpensive
-Quiet running
-Front Panel overclocking
-Good performance

Cons:
-Overclocking limited to GPU Core with controller

Acknowledgements:
We would like to thank Asus for sending this card to us for review.
 

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):      

• Core Clock – 575MHz      
• 16*32 x 12 pcs for 768MB 384bit high-speed DDR3      
• Memory Clock – 1800MHz      
• Integrated Dual 400MHz RAMDAC (up to QXGA 2048 x 1536 @85Hz)      
• Support PCI-Express 16X BUS      
• Dual DVI+HDTV (S-Video out)      
• Dimensions: 280mm * 126mm* 33.5 mm      
• Windows® XP/Built for Windows® Vista       
• 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

Product:  Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-ON GeForce 8800GTX 768MB
Author: Sean Kalinich           
Category: Enthusiast/ Gamer 
Reviewed on: May 15th 2007
Product cost: $554.99
Manufacturer: Foxconn
Spelling and Grammatical Editors: Paul Mercer

{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}

Packaging and Accessories: 4.5 out of 5
When I first opened the box that the Foxconn 8800GTX shipped in I thought I was looking at a Salvador Dali painting. But since you cannot judge a book by its cover I reserved my laughing at the graphics on the box and eagerly opened the box to see what was inside.

The inside is more Spartan but is very well put together.
As you can see the 8800GTX from Foxconn was well protected for its trip to me.
One very nice accessory that shipped with the 8800GTX from Foxconn is a USB game controller. This little PS2-like controller turned out to be quite a nice little addition and one that has found a permanent place on my workbench (and the gaming bench too )

{mospagebreak title=Features}

Features: 4.3 out of 5
The 8800GTX does come with a few nice features. Dual Dual-Link DVI is one that jumps to mind, but this is nothing new for nVidia high-end cards. Foxconn has also thrown in a few lights to keep you stimulated. In fact the entire heatsink has blue LEDs around it. (it’s vury purty)

For the rest of the features of the card, here are the specs from Foxconn’s website.

The software bundle was a little odd; I would have thought a game or a video editing tool would have been more appropriate. But I suppose these tools can be put to some use in a gamers system.

{mospagebreak title=Testing Methods}
Testing methodology:
PlanetX64.com’s testing methodology can be stated very simply. We test to see how well hardware performs on a "common" system. To this end we will install the most current drivers available; we do not use BETA drivers (unless they are the only publicly available drivers). We will also use the most current BIOS on each system. Each test platform will be a fresh install, with all of the latest patches installed, we also use commonly installed applications (Office, Antivirus software etc), and this will give us a good impression as to how well a given piece of hardware will run on a system. Also, other than 3DMark (currently 3DMark06) we will only use in-game tests using FRAPS (version 2.8) for graphics card testing.

{mospagebreak title=Performance The System}
Performance: 4.9 out of 5

The Systems:
I chose these two system as they represent (to me at least) what you would find in a high end gaming system, minus the small HDD size.. I also wanted to show performance on different chipsets. The drivers used for the ATi card were Cat 7.1 for the 8800GTX I used Forceware 100.54.  

Test system 1
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
Asus P5W DH
Kingston HyperX KHX6400D2LLK2/2GN (2x 1GB PC-6400)
2 x Western Digital 74GB Raptors 10k RPM
SilverStone Zeus 750 Watt PSU
Generic 16x DVD ROM
Generic 1.44M Floppy
Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-ON GeForce 8800GTX 768MB
ATi X1950XTX Crossfire Edition.
Windows XP Professional/ Windows Vista x64 Edition

Test system 2
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700
eVGA 122-CK-NF68 nVidia 680i
Kingston HyperX KHX6400D2LLK2/2GN (2x 1GB PC-6400)
2 x Western Digital 74GB Raptors 10k RPM
SilverStone Zeus 750 Watt PSU/ PC Power and Cooling 1KW PSU for Overclocking tests.
Generic 16x DVD ROM
Generic 1.44M Floppy
Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-ON GeForce 8800GTX 768MB
ATi X1950XTX Crossfire Edition.
Windows XP Professional/ Windows Vista x64 Edition

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part I }
System Tests:
All games were run at 1600×1200 with AA enabled (x4) and 16x AF. Max detail settings were also used.

3DMark06:
Here we have our one and only synthetic test. 3DMark06 is used not only to placate the number fiends out there but also to give you an idea of how well the system should perform under 3D intensive application.

Wow, as you can see the days of a single card hitting the "10k" mark at stock are here. I guess we should keep our eye out for 3DMark08 now.
The 8800GTX simply runs rings around the X1950XTX on any platform.

HalfLife2 Episode 1:
Valve reinvented the concept of the first person shooter with the release of the original HalfLife many years ago, pitting an Indiana Jones like scientist against hostile aliens and elite shadow ops troops against each other in a complex and diverse environment. Valve has again reinvented our notions of what a 1^st person shooter should be like with HalfLife 2 Episode 1. In this game you again play the character of Gordon Freeman, but this time you appear to be free of the control of the G-Man. Your objective this time, to save your own life and that of Alyx by getting out of City 17 as before the citadel of the combine explodes. But, it is not going to be an easy ride; Valve has upped the AI and included new and more lethal enemies to block your path. This chapter in the HalfLife series is as fun to play as it is hard on your system. For my testing I ran the Lowlife level from entry in the parking garage to your escape in the elevator from the hordes of zombies. As will all the other games I tested the resolution was 1600×1200 with 4xAA and 16x AF, all other settings were at their maximum level. The numbers here are telling.

The 8800GTX simply cleans up. There is no comparison to its performance in HalfLife 2 Episode One. There was something interesting though; I found that the Intel 975 chipset showed a performance increase when running Vista x64 (6.38%) This was not true on the 680i where I saw a 15.13% performance decrease.  This could be due to immature drivers for the 680i but it is something to keep in mind when configuring your system.

Battlefield 2142:
Here is another game in the Battlefield line, but un-like others in this series Battlefield 2142 does not have fast-paces single player action. It is demanding on a GPU though. For my testing I ran the Fall of Berlin level, this one seemed to have the best blend of objects, particles (snow) and shader usage. I played until the level was over (I usually lost). The resolution was set to 1600×1200 with AA at 4x and AF at 16x all other settings were set to their highest level.

Again with BF 2142 the 8800GTX simply walks away, granted the margins are not as big as they were with HalfLife 2 Episode One but they are still impressive. For Vista x64 gaming we saw a performance decrease across the board. Although the X1950XTX did not take as much of a hit as the 8800GTX did. The 8800GTX took a whopping 14.92% performance hit on the Intel 975 and a 7.2% hit on the 680i. The X1950XTX lost 4.24% and 2.83% respectively.

F.E.A.R.:
F.E.A.R., while not a current game is still one that can have an impact on your system. In terms of particle effects, shadows, and other graphical workload F.E.A.R. still ranks up there. While we will be moving to the newer Extraction Point for future testing but I still like the game-play and feel of this Monolith game. For my testing level I chose the Interval 01 Insertion level, this level takes you through a few nice little fire-fights with multiple enemies and plenty of opportunities for particle effects to come into play. Again resolution was at 1600×1200 with 4x AA and 16x AF. Volumetric lighting and soft shadows were enabled. All other settings were at maximum.

Score another win for the 8800GTX; again on both of the platforms I tested the 8800GTX from Foxconn takes the crown. Here the performance decrease between XP Pro and Vista x64 was closer between the two cards with the exception of the X9150XTX on the Asus P5W DH (A staggering 29.53% performance loss) the average performance hit was about 18.4%.

Need for Speed Carbon:
Need for Speed Carbon is a good example of a third person perspective game and with its reflections, rain, motion blur and other effects can have a heavy impact on your frame rates.  For testing I ran the Checkpoint Bronze challenge in the challenge series section.
Resolution was set to 1600×1200 with 4x AA and texture filtering set to ?Anisotropic?. All other visual effects were enabled or set to high. V-Sync was disabled.

In Need for Speed Carbon the performance gap between the X1950XTX and the 8800GTX is a little less pronounced but still there. So chalk up another win for the Foxconn 8800GTX. For Vista x64 Need for Speed Carbon turns out to be another game that is faster in Vista x64 than in XP Pro (7.86% faster). This performance improvement is only seen on the Asus P5W DH. When I moved to the 680i board I took an 8.55% performance hit.

  {mospagebreak title=Performance Part II}
Call of Duty 2:
My favorite bar-fight game is Call of Duty 2. This game hits you with everything it has right from the start. Never mind fancy friendly tactics or cunning enemies. No Call of Duty not only throws particle effects and physics at you but also mobs of enemies and the occasional friendly that runs right in front of you while you are shooting. But all of that aside Call of Duty 2 has always been hard on graphics cards and continues to be so. For testing I ran the Basic Training level from just after you pick up the submachine gun to the end of the level. This opening act throws enemies at you en masse from the start to the finish. Resolution was 1600×1200 AA was 4x AF filtering was enabled. One item of note; while testing in Vista x64 on the 8800GTX I could not use the in-game AA settings. I had to disable AA and turn it on in the nVidia control panel. If I set it in-game I would get nothing but a grey screen.

I talked to the guys over at nVidia and they say this is an issue with the game and Vista. I find this an interesting statement considering this issue was not present on the X1950XTX CF edition card I used. All other settings were at their maximum settings (number of corpses which was set to "insane").

Call of Duty 2 sees another win for the 8800GTX, but as with Need for Speed to margin of victory is small. But hey a win is a win. For Vista x64 we see another game where the 8800GTX enjoys a performance boost from Vista. Again only on the Asus P5W DH board, but at least this time the performance numbers are virtually even on the 680i with a performance hit of only .33%.

Company of Heroes:
Company of Heroes is a new game to your testing and turned out to be quiet addictive.
It combines the difficulties of a real time strategy game with the fast paced action of a third person shooter. All the while giving some of the most impressive graphics and effects I have seen in a RTS game. For testing I ran the Normandy campaign to just after the ?88′s? were destroyed on the hill. I completed all of the objectives for each mission.
Resolution was at 1600×1200 AA was enabled (there were no levels just enabled or disabled) texture filtering was set to Ultra. All other settings were at their highest level.

And in Company of Heroes the 8800GTX takes the prize again (I know big surprise there). In Vista x64 we see a uniform performance loss of 3.3% to 7.2% with the only notable exception being the X1950XTX on the 680i board this enjoyed a performance gain of 10.35%.

Hitman Blood Money:
Hitman Blood Money is a graphically stunning game, the backgrounds and characters in game are brilliantly rendered. I wish the same could be said for the quality of the dialog and story line. I think the guys at Eidos need to get out more and spend less time watching the telly! Fortunately the negatives brought about from watching too many extremely bad movies about life in an American "hood" are over shadowed by some good third-person "sneaker" play. Testing was done on the "Death of a Showman" level.
Resolution was 1600×1200 with 4xAA 16xAF and all other settings at their maximum levels. I did run into something interesting with Vista x64 and Hitman Blood Money. When I first installed the game and tried to run it I was greeted by an error saying there was a missing file msvcr71.dll. When I first saw this I was quite annoyed. However the fix turned out to be very simple. All I needed to do was to copy that file from Windows XP Professional and paste it into the Hitman Blood Money directory and I was off and running.

Here we see the 8800GTX scoring almost twice what the X1950XTX does. This is a rather impressive feat. It also would seem that HitMan Blood Money favors Vista x64 showing a performance gain across the board with the most impressive gain of 22.99% with the 8800GTX on the 680i mainboard.

{mospagebreak title=Gaming Observations}
Gaming Observations:
The 8800GTX will give a good kick to any game you throw at it. Even older games that I have not played in a while felt new. The image quality also brought out new details and with the improvements made in AntiAliasing and texture filtering there opens up a new avenue in gaming realism. Another pleasant surprise was the performance shown in Vista x64. With all of the doom and gloom predictions saying that just using Vista will hit you with a 15% performance loss it was nice to see that in more than half the games we used for testing the 8800GTX showed an improvement. In those that did not the loss was less than the stated 15% with the average performance hit being around 8%. To be honest with you I do not think you would notice an 8% difference since in most cases this was a matter of 4 or 5 frames per second. So it looks like the gaming future of Vista and Vista x64 does not look so dark. I would recommend the Foxconn 8800GTX for your Vista x64 gaming needs. 

{mospagebreak title=Overclocking}

Overclocking:
The Foxconn 8800GTX actually turned out to be a pretty decent overclocker.
I was able to push the one I have to 650 core and 2010 Memory. This was on the eVGA 680i Mainboard listed above.
The benefits of this overclocking were not amazing and only 3DMark06 saw a huge improvement in performance. There is, as of yet, no overclocking in Vista x64. I attempted to use nTune , however, anything over the stock memory and core speed would fail the test when I tried to apply the setting.

{mospagebreak title=Price/Warranty}

Price/Warranty: 4.3 out of 5
Price:
The Foxconn 8800GTX runs around $554.99 (from Newegg.com), this is the standard price for one of these and with the performance you get from one it is a good price. The added USB game controller does some to add to the value. One addition I would have liked to see would have been a current game title, but even without one it is still a good buy.

Warranty: 
Foxconn warrants its graphics cards against defects in material and workmanship under normal use for 3 years, during the first year it is a no questions asked, "real-time" warranty.
http://www.foxconnchannel.com/

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
In the end the Foxconn 8800GTX is a very nice card. I had no problems with running this card in XP Pro or in Vista x64. The speed was quite nice outpacing the X1950XTX Crossfire edition easily in XP Pro and still managing to squeak by in Vista x64. The odd fact that the 8800GTX was (in the majority of games) faster on the 975 chipset than on the 680i was quite interesting. Granted the QX6700 is not as fast as the X6800 but still at 1600×1200 the CPU speed should not make that much of a difference. Also the 680i overclocks the PCIe but to 125MHz with a 7900GTX or above so we should have seen a slight performance improvement while on the 680i, we did not. Otherwise the gaming performance was outstanding; the image quality has clearly gone up a notch. I cannot wait to see DX 10 titles on these cards. But with ATi?s R600 looming somewhere on the horizon (If AMD/ATi can ever get it launched.) there may be some competition in this market.
For your high-end gaming money the Foxconn 8800GTX is a great buy and one you would be sorry to pass up.

Pros:
VERY fast
Nice look
Included game controller
Good overclocking
Good cooling
Good Vista x64 performance

Cons:
Needs two PCI-e power connectors
WHQL drivers do not include desktop overlay
No Vista x64 overclocking

Scores:
Packaging and Accessories: 4.5 out of 5
Features: 4.3 out of 5
Performance: 4.9 out of 5
Price/warranty: 4.3 out of 5
Total: out of 18.0 out of 20

With its good combination of features performance and price the Foxconn 8800GTX earns our  

Discuss this eval here

Acknowledgements:

I would like to thank Isaac Poon at Foxconn for providing the 8800GTX for this evaluation