MSI GeForce 8800 GTS test

1 product related to this article

nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS

Last wednesday was dominated by the highly anticipated release of nVidia's GeForce 8800, the first DirectX 10 compatible videocards. In our extensive review, we looked thouroghly at all the specifications of nVidia's latest GPU and bombarded you guys with a long list of various benchmarks which showed just what nVidia's pride and joy, the GeForce 8800 GTX, was capable of. On average the 8800 GTX was 70% faster than any single conventional videocard. Truthfully the only negative thing we could think of was the huge price tag that the GeForce 8800 GTX carries, with a recommended retail price of around 490 pounds your almost forced to take a second mortgage on your house so as to be able to afford a DirectX 10 card. Luckily nVidia has launched a second version of the 8800 under the well known moniker, the GeForce 8800 GTS. The performance of this card may not be able to match that of its bigger brother, but you get what you pay for. MSI have supplied us with a sample of their GeForce 8800 GTS, the MSI NX8800 GTS-T2D640E.

Specifications

As we mentioned in our original GeForce 8800 test, there are several differences between the GTX and GTS versions that are worth mentioning. First of all the GTS has to make do with "only" 96 unified shaders instead of the GTX's 128. The amount of memory on both cards is also different: the GTX cards have 768 MB of memory with a 384 bit data bus whilst the GTS cards have 640 MB of memory with a 320-bit bus. Clock speeds for the GTS are lower as well, running at 500 MHz for the GPU and 800 MHz for the memory, when compared to the clock speeds of the GTX which runs at 575 MHz for the GPU and 900 MHz for the memory. Please note that these differences only affect the performance and not the graphical capabilities of the cards, which remain identical. In the table below we've put the various specifications and differences side by side for a clear comparison.