Nvidia has definitely been having a few great years and that came to fruition with the GeForce 8800 GT released late October. Of course AMD also brought forth their best graphics cards yet and due to Nvidia being unable to match the price they claimed the 3870 and 3850 are more than stiff competition. Nvidia though has an answer for that as well in their GeForce 8800 GT 256MB video card, taking a swipe at AMD's lowered price offerings. Today we have one of these cards to look at from Leadtek.

As with the normal GeForce 8800 GT the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB is also built off of Nvidia's new 65nm G92 core which shrinks the die reducing cost, power consumption and heat very effectively. As far as specs go the 256MB GeForce 8800 GT is almost identical to the normal GeForce 8800 GT except the RAM. They both feature 112 stream processors, 56/56 texture address filtering, a core clock of 600Mhz with some cards overclocked, shader clock of 1.5GHz or more, although the memory clockspeed in addition to the size is lower coming in at 1.4GHz compared to the 1.8GHz standard on a normal GeForce 8800 GT. Other than that they look very similar, both require a six pin PCI-E power connector,

The hardware accessories included are a DVI-to-VGA adapter, molex PCI-E power adapter, and a component cable for HDTV out. The software bundle included is Neverwinter Nights 2 the full version and CyberLink's PowerDVD 7.Here are the specifications from Leadtek:

• World’s First PCI Express 2.0 GPU Provides Support for Next Generation PC Platforms

• New GeForce 8800 GT GPU delivers the price/performance gamers have been demanding

• GPU/Memory Clock at 600/1800 MHz HDCP capable

• 256MB, 256-bit memory interface for Hi-Res /AA/AF gaming

• Support Dual Dual-Link DVI with awe-inspiring 2560x1600 resolution

• World's first DirectX 10 GPU delivers unparalleled levels of graphics realism and film-quality effects

• Smoothly playback H.264, MPEG-2, VC-1 and WMV video–including WMV HD

• Integrated HDTV encoder
  
  

We've switched over to AMD's Phenom quad-core processor for our video card benchmarks and also exchanged out a few games. Here's our current test system.

Our test system was Windows XP Professional SP2 with 7.12 revision of ATI's Catalyst drivers and 169.21 for Nvidia's.

Let's start things off with Crysis, the most advanced game engine on the market currently.

Here we see it is incredibly close with the 8800 GT 256MB against a 3870 with the new and improved GeForce 8800 GTS 512 coming out on top. This isn't too surprising as they are almost equa

Not much change in World in Conflict although the 3870 comes out ahead by a few frames per second over the 8800 GT 256MB.

Here is where the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB comes out very high on top with Unreal Tournament 3, although the game is texture heavy it doesn't seem to have much of an impact. Double digit gains are seen with the GeForce 8800 GT 256 MB over the other cards.

Finally we move onto Futuremark's 3DMark 2006, a favorite of some video card vendors although only a synthetic benchmark.

As with Unreal Tournament 3, 3DMark 2006 sees some big gains over the ATI cards with the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB coming in at 10873, more than 400 points higher than a Radeon HD 3870.

As far as overclocking we were able to reach 706MHz for the GPU speed and 963MHz for the RAM or 1.92GHz effective. This brought our Crysis score about three frames per second higher at 1280x1024 so not a huge % increase but in a game like Crysis those extra frames per second can definitely matter.