Evga E-geforce 8800 Gts 640mb Firmware Update

Nosotros know that AMD’southward next-gen ATI Radeon graphics cards are on the way this year, but until they make their debut, Nvidia’s GeForce 8000-series cards proceed to offer far-and-away the best 3D graphics performance. XFX’due south new 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS card is no exception, and its $300 cost tag ways you’ll have to suffer less of a financial blow to get ready for the dawn of side by side-gen PC graphics. Nvidia is still plagued by the absenteeism of a total Windows Vista driver, just even if the software was set today, with no true next-gen games to play with, we tin can’t say much nearly these cards’ next-gen functioning. What is articulate is that for current 3D games, if the 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS isn’t quite as fast as its higher-end GeForce counterparts, information technology’s still miles beyond anything currently available in its price range. It’s also a better deal than annihilation from ATI–at least, for now.

The deviation between the 320MB cards, though, lies by and large in clock speeds. The default 8800 GTS has a 500MHz core clock and a 1.6GHz memory clock. The Xxx goes up to a 580MHz core and one.8GHz on the memory, and the centre Extreme model goes down to a 560MHz cadre and 1.7GHz on the RAM. The 640MB cards take similar clock speeds, but the high-end and eye models have slightly slower cores. Our colleague Sarju Shah over at GameSpot put a wide selection of the cards through a battery of 3D benchmarks, and he found that the GeForce 8000-serial continues to dominate the older Radeon X1900’s, if not on raw performance, and so in value.

If you find all of the unlike flavors of the 8800 GTS confusing, nosotros don’t blame y’all. The easy fashion to think about this is if your monitor can’t display college than 1,920×1,280, you should be fine with the 320MB cards. If yous want to go higher than that, you’ll need a 640MB or larger model, especially if you want to plough on antialiasing and other paradigm-quality tweaks. Of course, that’s with current titles. It remains to be seen how that performance will calibration when truthful next-gen games, such every bit
Crysis
come out. As for ATI cards, the
512MB Radeon X1950 XTX
outperforms the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS at the higher-resolution settings, every bit expected and as well by a few frames here and there on the lower-resolution tests. It also costs about $100 more than the GeForce card, and unlike the GeForce 8000’s, all current Radeon cards lack support for DirectX 10, the Windows Vista-only special sauce that will bring 3D graphics to the adjacent level.

For its part, we think AMD tin can’t afford to take likewise much longer in bringing its own DirectX 10 cards to market. Nosotros know that its adjacent cards are code-named R600, and nosotros’ve heard multiple release-appointment rumors. It’s hard to abet waiting for these cards when we can’t say when they’ll come up out and when we don’t know anything nigh them. Nonetheless, if you’re not concerned about making the jump to a new 3D bill of fare right now, specially with no next-gen games on the immediate horizon, it might not be a bad idea to be patient. CNET chooses not to dabble in the accurateness-challenged pursuit of 3D graphics flake rumors, just you can find enough of Web sites out there that do. If you’d like to stay on top of what may (or may non) be down the road in 3D hardware, we’d suggest checking in on a site such as the
Inquirer
for any’due south currently churning in the rumor mill.

If yous’re wondering what makes the GeForce 8800 GTS so fast in general, we’ll refer yous to our review of the
GeForce 8800 GTX
for the full breakup of Nvidia’s new architecture, which applies to all of its 8000-series cards. We’ll point out hither, though, some contempo developments in video nosotros’ve discovered. The GeForce 8000-series cards all come with built-in support for HDCP decoding. This ways if your PC has an HD optical drive with built-in copy protection, your graphics card will qualify as a certified component, and you won’t take a chance a downgrade of your motion-picture show content if the industry ever decides to put that capability to work. The back plane of the card has two DVI outputs, equally well every bit a proprietary out for a component video adapter. We found in testing
a habitation theater PC from Velocity Micro
that pumping a Blu-ray movie through a GeForce 8800 GTS over HDMI works perfectly, but component video doesn’t piece of work in Windows Vista. Nvidia is aware of the problem, and is working on a commuter update to solve this and to bring the GeForce 8800 cards their beginning fully certified Windows Vista driver in full general. To its credit, Nvidia has also set a
public bug reporting site
for help with its Vista software development. For the video event, though, equally long as you use a DVI-to-HDMI adapter to connect the carte du jour to your tv set, you shouldn’t have whatsoever problem.

Finally, we can’t aid but signal out that the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS is i of, if not the first double-width card to drop beneath the $300 mark. We have a feeling the price tag on this model will entice many of yous who aren’t interested in crossing over into the $400 or $500 range. Be prepared, and so, to make way for this space-hungry piece of hardware. Even midrange 3D cards have long required a directly connection to your PC’s power supply unit of measurement, so we don’t expect you’ll be surprised by that requirement (Nvidia recommends a 400-watt PSU for this bill of fare). Likewise, exist sure to cheque out the inside of your example to come across what kind of room you take next to your PCI Express graphics slot before yous purchase this card; you lot might observe that you lot demand to rearrange an expansion carte or two to make the space.

Examination bed configurations:

Intel Core two Farthermost X6800; Intel 975XBX2 motherboard; 2GB Corsair XMX Memory (1GB x 2); 160GB Seagate 7,200rpm hard bulldoze; Windows XP SP2; Nvidia commuter – ForceWare 97.92. ATI driver – Goad 7.i