Review: New cooler-design

Another fast card made it to our lab and we put it through its paces and made it prove that it Goes Like Hell. Only the fastest cards from Gainward get this name, and 730MHz core and 1825MHz Shader speeds attest to that. The card’s full name is BLISS 8800 GTS Golden Sample (Goes Like Hell) PCX 1024MB.

Gainward almost made it their tradition to sell cards with 1GB of memory, but since it seems thiis is what buyers want – Gainward keeps making them. 1GB of memory running at 1050MHz (effective 2100MHz) will help this card at higher resolutions and that’s the only scenario where we expect it to significantly outperform its 512MB sibling. Default speeds of 8800GT are 650MHz core, 1625MHz Shader and 970MHz memory speed.



The cooler covers the whole card in the front while a black heatspreader does the same on the back. The heatspreader’s job is to cool the memory chips and to hold the front part in place.

Under the hood you’ll find a VGA cooler with a small, but quiet, fan. Two heatpipes connect the core with the heatsink that houses the fan. These or similar designs of VGA coolers are quite usual these days and what characterizes them is a fan in the center. The reason for this is that it significantly improves cooling by increasing the actual surface area it cools (underneath and on the sides). Gainward’s 8800 GTS GS 1GB cooler is a dual slot type.



The fan was almost inaudible, but we could hear it a bit during testing. ExpertTool is quite a practical tool that comes on Gainward’s driver CD and we clearly noticed that it regulated the fan RPM better than the ForceWare driver itself. You can use this tool for all the other GeForce cards, too.

The memory on this 1GB card is positioned on both sides – 512MB on each side. Both sides pack 8 GDDR3 Samsung K4J52324QE – BJ08 memory modules running only at 1050MHz. This means that memory overclocking should be a piece of cake. Under the cooler you’ll find the memory heatsink and we must add that the memory on this card is well protected and well cooled on both sides.



The dents in the metal tell us more about the placement of memory modules on the back. Only this part is made of metal, while the hood on the front is manufactured from some kind of plastic. Of course, if the whole thing was metal it would have been too heavy and definitely pricier. You can clearly see the two 8mm copper heatpipes stretching from the core to the aluminum fins. These heatpipes transfer the heat to the fins where the small 65mm fan takes care of heat dissipation. While running, the card hit temperatures of 65°C, whereas in idle mode it reached 47°C. We performed tests in an open case, so closed cases might result in temperatures higher by a few degrees.

If you want to view HDTV, HD DVD or Blu-Ray content then you’ll like Gainward. They include an HDMI adapter and SPDIF cable you can use to rout the sound to the card before sending both video and audio to your HDTV using just one cable.

In case you don’t have SPDIF out among your external ports or on your sound card, then you can use the internal SPDIF out somewhere on your motherboard (consult the manual for the exact location). You’re supposed to connect it to the white port left of the SLI connectors, but you don’t get a cable for that.

 

This DirectX 10 card will run in SLI configuration with two cards, but not in Tri-SLI that we’re going to test soon. Shader 4.0 and PCI Express 2.0 are just some of the features, but before we move on to the results let us show you the packaging.



You can clearly see that the box on the lower picture (1024MB version) looks somewhat more contemporary than the one above.


 

We tested another 1GB card and it seems as if these 1GB card versions are getting more and more popular. While slower cards can’t even start to utilize this much memory, 8800 GTS does it with no problem. This strong graphics chip can utilize this memory and score better in tests with high resolution settings. Unfortunately, we don’t have a 30-inch monitor and we couldn’t test this baby at extremely high resolutions, but in the few games where we tested up to 1920x1440 we didn’t find any significant improvements compared to cards with less memory.

We overclocked Gainward 8800 GTS 1024MB cards to 780MHz core and 1100MHz memory. This was the maximum core speed we managed ,whereas the memory could have gone even higher than 1150MHz. In the tables we put our first result with 780MHz core and 1100MHz (effective 2200MHz) memory speed.

Testbed:

Motherboard:
EVGA 680i SLI (Supplied by EVGA)

Processor:
Intel Core 2 Duo 6800 Extreme edition (Supplied by Intel)

Memory:
OCZ FlexXLC PC2 9200 5-5-5-18  (Supplied by OCZ)
        while testing CL5-5-5-15-CR2T 1066MHz at 2.2V

PSU:
OCZ Silencer 750 Quad Black ( Supplied by OCZ)

Hard disk:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB SATA (Supplied by Seagate)

CPU-Cooler:
Freezer 7 Pro (Supplied by Artic Cooling)

Case Fans:
Artic Cooling - Artic Fan 12 PWM
Artic Cooling - Artic Fan 8 PWM

ATI Driver:

Sample-R680_xp_vista_8-451-2-080123a
8-1_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_57717

Nvidia Driver:

169.21_forceware_winxp_32bit_english_whql
169.28_forceware_winxp_32bit_english_beta



Futuremarks



Futuremark claims that Gainward’s baby is the fastest one and that it’s mostly due to the higher clocks.


Gaming



Company of Heroes seems to like Gainward, as it scored up to 18% better than reference 8800 GTS cards. Of course, we’re talking about our overclocked card. Straight out of the box, 8800 GTS GS 1024MB beats dual-chip Radeon called HD 3870 X2. The overclocked card scored exactly 100 fps at 1920x1440.



F.E.A.R. doesn’t significantly benefit from more memory and it seems that in this game it’s the core speeds that win the fight. Overclocked MSI 8800 GT is on par with reference 8800 GTS cards. Bear in mind that things might change at higher resolutions; but also bear in mind that barely anyone plays games at resolutions higher than those we tested. We’re still hoping that someone will find a way to utilize 1024MB of memory on G92 8800 GTS card that has both the strength and the potential.

In Crysis, Gainward’s 8800 GTS 1GB started showing its muscle only at unplayable 1600x1200 resolution where antialiasing got a boost from additional memory. Maybe two SLI cards would have been a blessing at these resolutions and high game settings. Gainward outperforms the reference 8800 GTS by 22%.





Conclusion

Gainward keeps surprising us with innovative products and BLISS 8800 GTS GS card with 1GB memory deserves to be mentioned, since it’s currently among the top products in the offer. However, we can’t help but wonder what the result would have been if there were more games that use this much memory to its fullest potential. Newer titles should utilize additional memory better, but that’s not the case.

For those who need additional graphics memory for professional use, BLISS 8800 GTS 1024MB packs enough. This is a multimedia card also, and HDTV and HDMI are basic features that this card brings. You might spend a minute to connect the adapter cable to your HDMI, but in the end you’ll get excellent quality on your HDTV device.

The only thing that comes to our mind is that 1GB will be a good investment if you plan to keep this card for a while. In the long run 1GB of memory can definitely come in handy. On the other hand, though, an extra 512MB will set you back another €100 and it’s not something that every buyer might want to lay out.

We recommend this card to anyone with a clear idea of where to use it, as for the others – BLISS 8800 GTS 512MB, also from Gainward, might prove to be a more affordable and smarter solution.