Published in Reviews

Gainward 8800 Ultra in the house

by on15 May 2007
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Preview:
Fastest one from Gainward


New and currently the fastest Nvidia graphics card, the Geforce 8800 Ultra has finally arrived. Gainward's card has a new cooler with a better design that makes the card appear larger than an 8800 GTX, but the PCB is the same size, 10.5 inch or 27 centimetres.

If you look closely at the card, the only thing that points out the origin of the card is the small sticker on the cooler, which states that this expensive card comes from Gainward. The full name of the card is a bit longer, Gainward BLISS 8800Ultra Geforce 8800Ultra, 768MB DDR3, Dual-DVI.

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The card works at the reference 612 MHz for GPU and 2160 MHz for the memory. Another difference between this and the GTX is in the Shader clocks, GTX Shaders works at 1350MHz while the Ultra works a little faster, at 1500 MHz.

Higher clocks on GPU and memory should result in higher performance, up to 10-15%. There is 15% more memory bandwidth, which is now 101.3 GB/s compared to a GTX which has "only" 86 GB/s.

Today we have a short preview of the card for you, so that you can see that there is a boost in performance when compared to the last high-end card from Nvidia, the 8800 GTX.


We used:

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Intel Core 2 Duo 6800 Extreme edition
Nforce 680i EVGA board
OCZ Reaper 1066MHz 5-5-5-15
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB SATA NCQ hard drive
Akasa EVO AK 922 Blue Athlon 64/X2/FX cooler and Intel CPU's
Silverstone DA750W modular PSU

   

Composite Figures 3Dmark 06

3DMark 06

 

 

 

NVIDIA 8800GTX 575/1800 MHz

11160

 

 

 

Gainward 8800Ultra 612/2160 MHz

11887

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SM2.0 Test

Score

GT1

GT2

 

NVIDIA 8800GTX 575/1800 MHz

5139

42.410

43.233

 

Gainward 8800Ultra 612/2160 MHz

5537

45.605

46.671

 

 

 

 

 

 

HDR/SM3.0 Test

Score

HDR1

HDR2

 

NVIDIA 8800GTX 575/1800 MHz

5034

46.055

54.169

 

Gainward 8800Ultra 612/2160 MHz

5536

51.001

59.719

 

 

 

 

 

 

CPU Test

Score

CPU1

CPU2

 

NVIDIA 8800GTX 575/1800 MHz

2637

0.832

1.336

 

Gainward 8800Ultra 612/2160 MHz

2642

0.833

1.341

 

 

You get about 6% improvement overall in the 3DMark06 score, where the 8800Ultra scored 11,889 marks. In Shader Model 3.0, the improvement is about 9% when compared to an 8800GTX card.

   

FEAR

1024x768

1280x1024

1600x1200

2048x1536

NVIDIA 8800GTX 575/1800 MHz

172

163

144

103

Gainward 8800Ultra 612/2160 MHz

180

176

155

119

 

 

 

 

 

FEAR High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 16X

1024x768

1280x1024

1600x1200

2048x1536

NVIDIA 8800GTX 575/1800 MHz

150

115

86

60

Gainward 8800Ultra 612/2160 MHz

161

127

98

65


 

The score that we mentioned before was about 15% improvement and you can notice this at higher resolutions. In FEAR at 2,048x1,536, the Ultra scores 119 FPS while the GTX scores 15% less or 103 FPS.


To be continued.
 

Last modified on 15 May 2007
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