Say Hello to my little friend...Part I

Got this on last year's 24th Dec. It's X'mas eve! Though not celebrating one, I've squeezed my way through the traffic jams, and not forgetting those last-minute-x'mas-shopping-idiots (hey, me excluded, ok?). Grabbed my stuff, happily hugging it (with much love), paraded around the area for some time, showing off my "precious". Gone through at least 45 mins of traffic and idiot jams again, finally I was back to my command center. Whew...what a fruitful day! Well, sort of.

Asus 8800GTS G92 512MB Packaging

I now present you, the Asus 8800GTS G92 512MB! All hail the king of G92!!! With 65nm technology, 128 Stream processors that come close in terms of performance with its big bro 8800GTX, with a far, lower price. Smaller die size is always good once the technology matures, which means lower heat, lower power consumptions and lower price! The breakthrough of these G92 architectures produced the 8800GT and GTS series that would surely send ATI graphics card to hell (for the moment, though. There's never ending war in graphics technology.). That has led me to switch from ATI camp to Nvidia.

Close-up of the card. Nice fan with efficient cooling and low noise.

This upgrading thought came soon after my Call of Duty 4 ran below 60FPS (frames per sec.) with every settings & details max on the ATI X1900XT 512MB. The frame rates in first person shooter games play a vital role, especially if you are playing online competitively.

ATI X1900XT VS Nvidia 8800GTS G92

This card is long, even tad longer than my already huge X1900XT. People with smaller casings would have problems installing this monster. My DFI NF4 board just got all the SATA ports blocked by this huge behemoth if I wanted to install it in the 16x PCIe lane. Great. What an ingenious design from DFI team...NOT! I'll have to install the card on the lower 8x PCIe slot since I needed those SATA II ports. This would affect gaming performance, though not by much. It will be shown later in part II with real world game benchmarkings.

Nice GeForce emblem eh? Remember not to touch the silver part while gaming. It gets freakin' hot!!!

It is a beauty of technology. And performance wise, it delivers as promised. Boosting my COD4 frame rates of 60+ max on previous x1900xt to an average of 80-100+ FPS with every graphical settings to max (with AA off though. Who needs AA on 1680x1050 resolution? *grin*). Remember this phrase of wisdom always: the higher the FPS, the more advantages you'll have in games. Seriously, for performance freaks, this is the main reason why you should put the money where your mouth is. With its two slots cooling system, it is very efficient by keeping both the temperature and noise low. Even the fan speed is set to 60% in Asus smart doctor, the noise are still acceptable, as contrary to single slot cooling solution found on 8800GT.

Left: 8800GTS backside. Right: Installed and running.

To be continued in Part II with some benchmarkings on X1900XT vs 8800GTS and difference between 16X PCIe vs 8X PCIe vs 2X PCIe speeds. Stay tuned.

Oh, on a side note, this card is currently in the RMA process. Crap. No games for me for at least a month! Poor RMA system we have in this country. Anyways, suspected the Qimonda Vram was not very reliable. I've encountered regular freezes and artifacts in games. Hmmm...