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The Asus EN8800GT is the first card we've reviewed with Nvidia's new GeForce 8800 GT graphics chip. You should be able to find this card for just less than $300 or so online, which puts its real world price a bit higher than Nvidia's suggested price of about $250. With its main competition from ATI, the Radeon HD 3870 coming in firmly at $249, you might expect that the new 8800 GT chip would be significantly faster. It's not. On some games Nvidia's new cards wins, but on others, it can't overtake ATI's cheaper alternative. Its saving grace is its capability on the tests it does win, as well as the state of Nvidia's dual-card SLI technology, which is much more robust than ATI's right now. If you can find the EN8800GT for its $300 suggested price, it's not a bad pick, especially if you intend to double up in SLI mode. Just be sure to consider very carefully the games you play, as ATI gives Nvidia's new chip some stiff competition.
The GeForce 8800 GT is not the first midrange card from Nvidia's 8800 series. The 8800 GTS came out a year ago in two versions, one $450 model with 640MB of RAM, another with 320MB for $300. A year later, and the new $300 512MB GeForce 8800 GT beats them both soundly on our benchmarks, as tested by GameSpot's Sarju Shah. Nvidia's new chip also overtakes AMD's similarly priced 512MB ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT on almost every test as well. The problem is it can't overtake the newer Radeon HD 3870 on Crysis or Bioshock.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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1,280x1,024 |
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1,920x1,440, 4x anti-aliasing 4x anisotropic filtering, very high quality |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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1,600 x 1,200, high quality |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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2,048x1,536, high quality |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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1,920x1,440, max quality, 4xaa |
If you look at all of the scores, you'll see that where ATI wins, it slips by with a thin margin of victory. When the 8800 GT is faster, it's faster by a lot. Add in the fact that on certain tests ATI's CrossFire (the dual-card competitior to Nvidia's SLI) is basically broken (as highlighted in our review of the Radeon HD 3850, and the GeForce 8800 GT barely ekes by with an overall win. If you play Crysis or Bioshock regularly and you're committed to a single-card experience, ATI is the way to go. Otherwise, we'd go with the Nvidia card.
