The board, the review

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The GeForce 8800 GT 256 MB isn’t only, as the name indicates, a 256 MB version of the GeForce 8800 GT. The decreased memory capacity is also slower. With the official specifications at 700 MHz, the bandwidth is 22% lower. It’s a difference that’s bigger than that of the first generation of GeForce 8800 GTS (640 and 32 MB), but smaller than between the GeForce 7800 GTX and its 512 MB version (the difference in memory clock is even more pronounced and followed by a difference in GPU clock). Whatever the result, it’s disappointing that NVIDIA hasn’t opted for a more pertinent label for its cards. Indeed, a whole lot of people may wrongly believe that the GeForce 8800 GT 256 MB is just equipped with less memory than the previous model, and will boast the same performance in standard resolution, which won’t be the case.

Main Cards Specifications
GPU HD 3850 HD 3870 8800 GT 8800 GT 256 Mo
GPU Clock 670 MHz 775 MHz 600 MHz 600 MHz
Shaders Clock 670 MHz 775 MHz 1500 MHz 1500 MHz
Memory Clock 833 MHz 1125 MHz 900 MHz 700 MHz
Width of the Memory Bus 256 bits 256 bits 256 bits 256 bits
Type of memory GDDR3 GDDR4 GDDR3 GDDR3
Memory capacity 256 MB 512 MB 512 MB 256 MB
Number of Pixels/Vertex Pipelines (80) (80) (28) (28)
Number of texturing units 16 16 56 56
Number of ROP 16 16 16 16
Throughput 429 GFlops 496 GFlops 336 GFlops 336 GFlops
Memory bandwidth 53,3 GB/s 72 GB/s 57,6 GB/s 44,8 GB/s
Number of transistors 666 million 666 million 754 million 754 million
Process 0.055µ 0.055µ 0.065µ 0.065µ
Die’s surface 196 mm² 196 mm² 324 mm² 324 mm²
Generation 2007 2007 2007 2007
Supported Shader Model 4.1 4.1 4.0 4.0

For this review, we’ve obtained the Gigabyte sample card that strays once again from the reference design thanks to a shorter PCB and a Zalman VF700 AlCu cooling system. This board is actually identical, give or take a few capacitors, to the manufacturer’s 8800 GTS. It is therefore shorter than the 8800 GT, but unlike the 8800 GT, uses two slots because of the cooling system’s height, which doesn’t send the air out of the casing but cools the not-so-hot memory chips with its radial fan.

GeForce 8800 GT 256

Gigabyte takes advantage of the efficiency of the cooling system to slightly push the original clocks to 700 MHz for the GPU (+17%) and 750 MHz for the memory (+7%) for an average improvement of approximately 9%. The memory chips are Hynix - made and certified to run at 714 MHz - but we’ll see later on that we were able to go way beyond that. Nevertheless, for the rest of the review, we’ve clocked the board to the 8800 GT 256 MB original frequencies (600/700 MHz).

Test Setup:

  • Asus P5K3 Deluxe
  • Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (3 GHz)
  • Kingston 2 x 1024 MB in DDR-3 800 5-5-5-15-21
  • Hitachi T7K250 250 GB
  • Optical Drive DVD Asus 12x
  • Tagan U15 Easycon 530 W
    • Windows XP Pro
    • ForceWare 169.06
    • Catalyst 7.11

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