Shootouts

A Ten-Course GeForce 8800 GT Feast

By Vincent Chang - 28 Nov 2007

Temperature Testing & Overclocking

Temperature Testing

Hot and hotter seems to be the prevailing sentiment for the GeForce 8800 GT cards in general and with so many overclocked cards in our roundup, it's bound to get worse. Predictably, the worst culprits are those with higher clocks and while their performance is certainly fast, the temperatures of cards like the ASUS, Leadtek and Zotac were also correspondingly high. Surprisingly, the Gigabyte card also ranked among the hotter cards, despite its standard clock speeds. With core temperatures averaging around 70 degrees Celsius in our air-conditioned lab, the GeForce 8800 GT is not a graphics card you will buy without careful consideration of your case ventilation. Going for a third party cooler may well be the choice for most and Palit's example here is worth looking into, since its non standard two-slot cooler did manage to snare a lower temperature reading than most of its peers, and in spite of being overclocked too.

Overclocking

You would not be wrong if you thought that the overclocking aspect would be curtailed by the high temperatures on the GeForce 8800 GT. With mostly identical coolers, we found that the allowance on these cards were quite similar, with 750MHz emerging as the highest core overclock while memory clocks started hitting a snag at around 2100MHz DDR. Of course, you may get better results with alternative cooling solutions or even by upping the fan speed (likely accompanied with more noise). Some of the already overclocked cards, like the ASUS and XFX were by default near their overclocking limits and we could barely squeeze any more hertz from them. The XFX in particular did not manage even a small increment in core or memory and we gave up on it after having it hang on us repeatedly during testing. Similarly too for the ASUS, which had a very minor increase in memory clock. In the end, if you had to go by the results, the Gigabyte ended up with the highest score, thanks to its 750MHz core, followed closely by the Leadtek and Zotac.

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