EVGA 8800GTS 320MB card question(s)

brembo · Post by **brembo** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 2:50 pm

I'm curently on a 7900GS card, been a dandy little card, overclocked to 580 core and 850 memory, idles at 45-ish and yops out at 58-ish celcius when under load. I took it as far as it would go with the stock cooler before artifacts popped up.

Tho I have a problem now. Tom Clancy's Rainbow 6-2 is killing my framerates. I really like this game and even with the OC I have in place it'll drop nto the mid 20s famerate when things get hectic. This is with quality settings at medium across the board. The only other game I really hammer away at is BF2, and with everything maxed the game caps the framerate at 100fps and it hardlt ever drops below 90, so that is okay.

So I started researching cards and I'm leaning towards the 8800GTS(320 meg) reference card. I normally play on 1600x1200 resolution, with settings as tweaked as possible. Rainbow 6 being 1024x768 as the 1600 settings murders the card.

System specs:
e6400 Duo Conroe (no OC)
2 gigs of Nanya running in 5-5-5-15, 333 mhz
375 watt, 30 amp PSU (rated)<------ MAIN CONCERN
Two WD 7200rpm HDDs, Raid stripe 0
couple of DVD roms/rams

I know that higher resolutions will destroy the 320 meg frame buffer, but since I prefer lower resolutions, that should not be a factor. So, will a 8800GTS cause my PSU to shrivel up and become a smoking hunk of garbage? I've found one for 137$ shipped and that seems a great deal, its not quite as zippy as the GTX as a few pipelines have been nipped and the cores aren't as fast (stock, I'll fiddle with those). My voltages are rock steady with the current OC and I've cooked em in for a few hours with ATITool and many hours of gamplay. I simply do NOT want to swap out the PSU, call me lazy or cheap but I'd love to slide by without having to do so.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 2:55 pm

PSU is borderline IMO.

brembo · Post by **brembo** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 3:00 pm

YARDofSTUF wrote:PSU is borderline IMO.

I type all that and all I get is "PSU is borderline IMO"?

Oh FFS, you could have at least assauged my ego by padding that some. Geez. That's like Leo Tolstoy handing his first edition to a friend, them reading it, handing it back and going "meh....good read".

I'll get you for this YoS *shakes fist*

BTW, thanks, you confired my fears. Asshat.

Noevo · Post by **Noevo** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 8:14 pm

should upgrade some parts

brembo · Post by **brembo** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 8:42 pm

Noevo wrote:should upgrade some parts

should remove self from breeding pool

Noevo · Post by **Noevo** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 8:52 pm

brembo wrote:should remove self from breeding pool

can I still just do laps in the pool?

brembo · Post by **brembo** » Sat Apr 19, 2008 8:56 pm

aw hell, that's what I do, "spectate" if you will

brembo · Post by **brembo** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 5:21 pm

Well, I could not pass up the price and went ahead and snagged the card (~120 shipped) and installed it. Ran fine, all my rails were within spec initially and after about an hour of running ATITool for some basic benchmarking.

Since then I've bumped up the core to 650 and the memory to a rather zesty 1020, much more and at load artifacts pop up on ATITool. It benches around what a moderatly overclocked 8800GT shows, so I'm happy with that. I get 40-60fps in Rainbow 6v2 on 8x "quality" settings, looks fantastic and runs smooth. I was getting tearing, but with the overhead of frames I see, I just enabled v-synch and all was well.

It's a quality card in manufacture (EVGA 8800GTS, no stock O/C 320mb), the fan at 100% keeps the GPU at around 60 celcius and makes only the faintest whine, way quieter than the 7900GS it replaced. I'm pretty pleased with it so far, and even with some pretty heavy O/C my PSU has yet register any complaints. I did some research and the PSU I'm using was shipped bundled with 8800s in many cases.

Joel · Post by **Joel** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 7:20 pm

Was this the one with the rebate? My brother got it. Solid card at a very low price.

brembo · Post by **brembo** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 7:27 pm

Joel wrote:Was this the one with the rebate? My brother got it. Solid card at a very low price.

No, this was an Ebay auction. I did find another NEW one for 99.99, but with 28$ (OMG) shipping.