When Nvidia unleashed the mighty G80 core on an unsuspecting world, the first choruses of approval for the DirectX 10 capable card were dampened down by the fierce price tag it carried (around the £400 mark) for the high end 8800GTX.Even its less capable sibling, the 8800GTS, had a price of around £300. To try to make the card more attractive to the mainstream market and therefore sell more cards, Nvidia took the standard GTS with its 640MB of GDDR3 memory and halved it to produce the 8800GTS 320, with an appropriate drop in price.
Apart from the memory, the 320 is identical to the standard 8800GTS, with a 500MHz core clock and an 800MHz (effective 1,600MHz) memory clock running thorough a 320-bit memory interface.
Because of the new architecture of the G80, the pixel and vertex pipelines that we knew and loved have been replaced by unified shader technology which, in the case of the 8800GTS, consists of 96 stream processors running at 1,200MHz. Each of these stream processors can be dynamically allocated to geometry, vertex, pixel or physics operations.
To alleviate the performance lag that only having half the memory brings, Foxconn took the most obvious route and overclocked both the core and memory engine speeds, but unfortunately left the shader clocks at the standard GTS speeds. But what a speed increase: the 320 Overclocked Edition runs at standard 8800GTX speeds straight out of the box; 575MHz core and 900MHz (effective 1,800MHz) memory clocks.
So what does all that mean in performance terms? First up the synthetic testing with 3DMark06. Tested at a 1,280 x 1,024 pixel resolution, the GeForce 8800GTS 320 OE gave a score of 8,164, somewhat faster than Foxconn’s standard 8800GTS 320 which gave a score of 7,989, and not that far behind its 8800GTX at 10,537.
When it comes to real life games, the story is much the same between the two GTS 320 cards. The standard card gave frame rates of 83.1 and 108.54 in Doom 3 and Far Cry respectively, while the overclocked version produced frame rates of 90.8 and 11.76 for the same two games. To really push the cards we tested them both with F.E.A.R. and got average frame rates of 79 for the standard card and 90 for the overclocked one.
To make the card even more appealing, Foxconn has decided to go against the standard practice of bunging in a load of unwanted games with the 320 OE and instead bundled a USB 3D Game Pad and a couple of software utilities; RestoreIT v7 which is for making backups of your data, VirtualDrive Pro v10 which allows you to create up to 23 virtual optical drives and Virtual Hard Drive which uses part of the system memory to create a RAM disk.
Related Websites
Popularity: 68% [?]
