A thorn in AMD's foot? 8800GS

[staffsMike]

Nvidia and XFX launch GeForce 8800 GS | News | Custom PC

It seem the 8800GS is supposed to fill the old 640mb GTS's shoes.. (about where the HD3850 and HD3870 sit)

Still a bit pricey though, £130.. they will need to do better than that to get my interest unless it is significantly better than AMD's offerings.

[iknownothing]

for something around that range and of that calibre will it outperform this???? the card below is priced at £143 inc. vat
512MB PowerColor HD 3870 PCS PCI-E 2.0, 2400 MHz, GDDR4, GPU 800MHz, 320 Streams, 2xDVI-I

Thanks,
Lee

[staffsMike]

I wouldn't like to say either way but, yes potentially.

If it really picks up from the old 8800GTS then it's performance will match or best the HD3850/3870's I would think.

[TooNice]

The old 640MB can outdo the 3870 more often than not, so from a performance perspective, if this card does what it says what it claims, then it is likely to squarely aimed competing against the 3870 by gaining a cost and performance advantage. I think the biggest hole they've left, again, from a performance and price perspective, is the void that the 3850 fills. Looking at the specs though, I would expect this card to do a little better than the 640MB at lower resolution, but a bit worse at higher resolution (less memory and slower memory clock - for the standard version).

I think the amount of memory is just perfect actually for anything under 1900x1200. I really don't expect this card to experience the sharp drop of performance observed occasionally on the 256MB GT. Where the 256MB GT does not struggle though, I reckon it will still be a faster card. To be honest, I think that nVidia's line up is really, really strange. They have several products in their line-up I feel would interchangeably compete with one another.. sometime more than their competition.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The old 640MB can outdo the 3870 more often than not, so from a performance perspective, if this card does what it says what it claims, then it is likely to squarely aimed competing against the 3870 by gaining a cost and performance advantage. I think the biggest hole they've left, again, from a performance and price perspective, is the void that the 3850 fills. Looking at the specs though, I would expect this card to do a little better than the 640MB at lower resolution, but a bit worse at higher resolution (less memory and slower memory clock - for the standard version).

I think the amount of memory is just perfect actually for anything under 1900x1200. I really don't expect this card to experience the sharp drop of performance observed occasionally on the 256MB GT. Where the 256MB GT does not struggle though, I reckon it will still be a faster card. To be honest, I think that nVidia's line up is really, really strange. They have several products in their line-up I feel would interchangeably compete with one another.. sometime more than their competition.

You can get HD3870 cards for £130 now so I think it is still very competitive. It is also likely that the 512mb HD3850 cards which cost around £115 now will also drop in price too. You can get the 256mb HD3850 cards for £95 also.

I wonder how the lower clocked 8800GS 384mb which costs £115 compares to the non overclocked 256mb 8800GT which is similiarily priced??

[staffsMike]

256mb 8800GT just isn't worth considering imo. I think the GS if it lives up to its claims it will be the better card.

[iknownothing]

imo i reckon put the 3870 i posted up against the old gts and the gs when testing happens etc. will then give me a good point of view seeing as i may be getting a 26" hd screen so i can play ps3 and pc on one screen...
drop me a pm as i dont know about the card palying in hd etc and if its pretty good for a pc on a 26" screen. thanks
Lee

[TooNice]

Is the vanilla version confirmed at £115? edit: I see Dabs offer pre-orders at that price, though Scan charge £130 for the vanilla, and £150 for the OC. As there are so many cards with similar performance, you really need to shop around to have a good idea of a "typical" cost of the card (and to have a good deal for yourself). Things are slightly more stable on the AMD side with only two products on their upper end to choose from.

The vanilla GS has a slower core and less stream processor and the same memory speed as a vanilla 256MB GT so I'd expect it to be a little slower than the 256MB at the lower settings/resolution. Still, I don't think it would 'crash' in performance like the 256MB does in some games at higher resolution/settings, and with the costs being so close, I do consider it a more versatile card and if I was trimming nVidia's line up, I would be more likely to drop the 256MB than the GS. That, or drop the 256MB GT to £100 to really challenge the 3850.

It's a little regrettable that the GT didn't come with a memory bus width of 384 or 320 bit. Even with 320MB of video RAM, a 320MB GT probably would've been adequate up to 1600x1200 or perhaps even 1900x1200 (as opposed to the current 256MB which is excellent 8-9/10 but chocking really bad when hitting its limit). Then a GS with a bus width of 256bit with 256/512MB could be used to compete against the 3850.

[this_is_gav]

This is why the 8800GTs didn't keep falling in price by the looks of it. They've just released a filler product instead. It's just a means of keeping the 8800GT prices high after the hype (which it looks took nV completely by surprise).

[Pob255]

One thing to remember about this new GS is it's only 192mbit bandwidth not the 256mbit bandwidth of the GT so even if the memory is clocked to the same speed the GS will still perform worse than the GT

It's all still a bit too eairly to tell how the GS is going to fair or what the price is going to be, I seem to remember that the 512mb 8800GT was suposed to be released at $200-250 and after a quick look at newegg $250-300 is the actual price range

Must admit that after doing some digging on the HD3870 I'm not so sure about this card, looking at overclocking as a good indicator, while people have pushed the gpu to 1ghz it requires non-stock air cooling and volt modding however the memory seems to be capped at around 1200-1300mhz (not much more than stock)
While the current 8800GT runs hot on the stock cooler, it does seem to be far eaiser to overclock (software/bios rather then haveing to physically alter the card.)

The HD3850 256mb while not the best performance wise, can be got for as little as £85 which does make it a great low cost card and I don't think there's anything nvidia have currently for £85 that can catch it.

But as I said before it's still too eairly, untill we see a few "real" benchmarks and uk prices for the 8800GS then I think it'll be best to hang onto your cash

[fraps]

384 mb - poor - it should be at least 512mb

[fraps]

why not get a 3870 instead?

[crcr]

Yeah, too expensive currently.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The HD3870 costs around £130 to £140 whereas the 512mb HD3850 costs around £115.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The first proper 8800GS review I could find

Expreview.com - Extra Hardware News Report! » Blog Archive » [review] Palit GeForce 8800GS 384MB & 768MB

It seems that the HD3850 256mb is faster in Call of Juarez,COH,Crysis and Bioshock whereas the 8800GS 384mb is faster in other games. However the £25 difference means that the HD3850 256mb is better value for money.However the 8800GS 384mb is around the same speed as the HD3850 512mb which costs virtually the same - in some games it is signifcantly faster and in others the HD3850 soundly beats it - Crysis and Bioshock being two of them!

[MadduckUK]

9600GT = probably worth holding on for.

seems like the 8600's were just a blip. and were going to be back to the great price/performance that the 6600's and 7600's had