X-bit labs

Quiet Power: Elitegroup N8800GT-512MX DT Graphics Card Review

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 03/18/2008 | 02:53 PM ]

Today we are going to talk about an attempt by ECS Company to design a completely silent modification of Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB and will see how successful this solution turned out.

Table of contents:

• Package and Accessories
  
• PCB Design and Specifications
  
• Cooling System
  
• Noise, Temperature, Overclockability, Compatibility
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Battlefield 2142
  
• BioShock
  
• Call of Juarez
  
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
  
• Crysis
  
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
  
• Half-Life 2: Episode Two
  
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
  
• Unreal Tournament 3
  
• Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
  
• Tomb Raider: Legend
  
• Performance in RPG
  
• Hellgate: London
  
• Gothic 3
  
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
  
• Performance in Strategies
  
• Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
  
• Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
  
• World in Conflict
  
• Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Futuremark 3DMark05
  
• Futuremark 3DMark06
  
• Conclusion
  

The modern GPUs with unified architecture are known to have a far higher computing capacity than the previous generations of GPUs, but not all games can put their resources to full use. A good example is our recent test of the Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT: in many games its 64 shader processors proved to be enough to deliver performance similar to the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB. It means the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB can be as fast as the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB if it is overclocked to the same GPU and memory frequencies.

We have tested a number of pre-overclocked models of GeForce 8800 GT 512MB and found them to be equal or even superior to the GeForce 8800 GTX. And now we’ve got the opportunity to see how the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB and the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB differ in performance if their clock rates are identical. For this test we’ve taken a curious sample of 8800 GT 512MB manufactured by Elitegroup Computer Systems, the well-known mainboard maker.

The increased frequencies are not the only difference of the ECS N8800GT-512MX DT from Nvidia’s reference card. A special feature of this product is its ability to work silently thanks to the Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 system that already showed its worth on the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro. If our supposition is true and the retail price of the ECS card is lower than that of the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB, it can be viewed as an excellent choice for a user who is interested in modern games and cares about the noise produced by his gaming platform.

Package and Accessories

Following Gigabyte, PowerColor and Albatron, ECS uses an upright box for its product. It is not large:

The box is painted black and silver, its front side bearing a picture of a dragon-rider. This fantasy style is quite a hackneyed theme among hardware makers. You can see all sorts of dragons, monsters, knights and elves so often on the boxes with graphics cards and mainboards that your eyes can’t really be surprised and attracted to them.

You can learn the basic information about the product, except for the GPU and memory frequencies, from the front side of the box. Besides the graphics card proper, it contains the following accessories:

• 2 x Molex→6-pin PCI Express power adapter;
• DVI-I→D-Sub adapter;
• Universal 7-pin mini-DIN→YPbPr/Composite/S-Video splitter;
• Two additional fans (Turbo Module);
• 3-pin MB→4-pin Molex power adapter;
• User’s manual;
• CD disk with drivers.

The accessories aren’t rich or numerous, yet the ECS N8800GT-512MX DT is quite a unique thing in its own right for the user to need additional stimulation, like free games for example, to make the purchase. There is everything you need to use the card in your system – that’s enough for a majority of gamers. Some won’t even use the additional fans – we’ll tell you about their purpose below. Note that the fans can be connected to the mainboard’s 3-pin header or to a 4-pin Molex connector thanks to the included adapter.

Overall, there’s nothing extraordinary about the packaging and accessories of the ECS N8800GT-512MX DT. The box looks nice, although doesn’t stand out among other manufacturers’ products, and the accessories are just sufficient. The only thing we don’t like is the lack of a software multimedia player for reproducing Blu-ray, DVD and HD DVD formats. If you are going to use this noiseless card in your HTPC, you’ll have to purchase the software directly from the developer, CyberLink or InterVideo.