X-bit labs

Foxconn GeForce 8800 GTX Graphics Card Review

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 05/20/2007 | 05:55 PM ]

A lot of companies do their best to win their spot under the sun in the graphics card market. Although it a pretty hard task to accomplish these days, Foxconn Company decided to give this new business a try. Today we are going to take a closer look at the new graphics solution from this manufacturer and find out how the performance of the flagship Nvidia product has changed with the release of the new driver version.

Table of contents:

• Package and Accessories
  
• PCB Design
  
• Overclockability and Noise
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Battlefield 2142
  
• Call of Juarez
  
• Far Cry
  
• Far Cry HDR
  
• F.E.A.R. Extraction Point
  
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
  
• Half-Life 2: Episode One
  
• Prey
  
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
  
• Performance in Third-Person Shooters
  
• Hitman: Blood Money
  
• Splinter Cell: Double Agent
  
• Tomb Raider: Legend
  
• Performance in RPG
  
• Gothic 3
  
• Neverwinter Nights 2
  
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
  
• Performance in Simulators
  
• X3: Reunion
  
• Performance in Strategies
  
• Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
  
• Company of Heroes
  
• Supreme Commander
  
• Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 1.2.0
  
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 1.0.2
  
• Conclusion
  

New companies and new products debuting on the market often provoke ambiguous impressions on the customer part. On one hand, the company that is squeezing into a highly competitive market tries hard to satisfy and even astonish the client. But on the other hand, new brands may want to achieve their goal by any means and some secondary consumer properties of their product may suffer as a consequence.

The quality of such a young brand as Foxconn is vouched for by the history of Hon Hai Precision Industry (also known as Foxconn Electronics). Having been an OEM supplier of major companies like Dell and Hewlett Packard, Foxconn decided to directly sell its products to customers in 2003-2004. It released its mainboard series in 2005 and graphics card series in 2006.

Seemingly a new name on the market, the company has got production facilities that serve major PC, game console and consumer electronics makers such as Apple, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Sony and others.

Introducing its graphics card series to the market, Foxconn didn’t limit itself to bottom market sectors. March 2006 it announced the Foxconn GeForce 7900GTX model that was the fastest single-chip solution from Nvidia at the moment. Afterwards the company released a wide range of GeForce 7-based products for different user categories.

In this review we will check out the newest and currently the fastest solution Foxconn offers right now – Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-ON. We’ll learn in what points this product differs from other companies’ alternatives and see how the ForceWare driver has improved since the launch of the GeForce 8800 series in the early November of 2006.