Leadtek 8800GTS 640MB

Reviews: Hardware

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Max Slowik
Kurtis
N/A
Aug. 16, 2007

Specifications

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Introduction

I've said it before: the 8800-series cards are great. They are heavy-hitters in the gaming world. They are well-built and very quiet. And, even though they've been available for some time, their domination of the high-end market doesn't seem to be challenged.

One drawback to the series, at its launch, was the nearly unprecedented price. Now they're affordable. Not cheap, but the price can be justified by the gamer looking for the best. It doesn't hurt that both NVIDIA and ATI have not made mainstream video cards that perform nearly as well as the reigning 8800s.

There were other problems with the 8800s' launch. The cards were made available before Vista's launch. This was problematic because, being DirectX 10 parts, they required Vista to take full advantage of their feature set. Consumers were happy puttering around with Windows XP, and many were not about to take the one-two of buying Vista and a very expensive video card, especially without any DirectX 10 games to play. Today, however, Vista prices are affordable, and DirectX 10 games are coming down as well.

People who waited for the mainstream cards have been or will be disappointed by their performance. These top-shelf video cards have a lot to offer, all over again.

On the bench, we've got a Leadtek "WinFast" 8800GTS 640MB video card. It is stock-clocked, lightly bundled, and priced enticingly at well under $400. Now that the initial drawbacks are moot, is it still the card of your dreams, or have new drawbacks cropped up?

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: The Card & Bundle
Page 3: Test Setup
Page 4: Testing - HL2 Episode 1
Page 5: Testing - F.E.A.R.
Page 6: Testing - Company of Heroes
Page 7: Testing - Prey
Page 8: Testing - Need for Speed Most Wanted
Page 9: Testing - 3DMark 06 & HQV
Page 10: Performance Summary, Overclocking & Conclusion

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5 User Comments

1 - Posted by handrail on August 16, 2007 - 4:45 pm

looks like the hood off a 70s trans-am.

2 - Posted by Rich on August 17, 2007 - 5:03 pm

Show me the FLAMING CHICKEN!!!!

3 - Posted by PrinceGaz on August 17, 2007 - 9:33 pm

I just received an identical card today (a Leadtek 8800GTS with the blue heatsink cover).

I've put it through its paces and am absolutely staggered by how high it overclocks. Yours was good, but mine is staggering.

Using the latest 162.18 drivers, it is rock solid with nTune used to raise the settings from the default 513/792 (near as dammit to the 500/800 stock speeds the card is advertised as having). Now I'd expect to be able to raise the core by quite a bit, and indeed I did, but memory is always limited by the speed of the chips used on the card, and whether you are lucky (and with ten memory chips on an 8800GTS, you can't hope for too much).

I was amazed. The core passed 550 easily. 600 as well. At that point I decided to let ATITool do my overclocking and I'd hit Abort as soon as I saw a problem. 600 passed without a problem again, as did 650. It was only somewhere soon after 670 that some corruption appeared, though it was minor and was able to stop ATITool immediately.

I then reset the core to default and decided to see what the memory could do. From the default of around 800, it passed 850, 900, 950 (at this point I was worried it wasn't testing it properly as this seemed a very high memory overclock), 1000, soon after which I paniced and hit the Abort as I feared damaging my card. As it turned out after running other tests, 1000 was pretty much the stable maximum for the card.

After determining safe speeds (650 core, 1000 memory) I've ran intensive tests and it is rock solid on my system (X2 4400+ @ 2.5GHz), with the following 3DMark06 results

default- 8330 (3894 sm2.0, 3751 HDR/sm3.0, 1929 cpu) @ 513/792d (162.18 driver)
default- 8953 (4223 sm2.0, 4207 HDR/sm3.0, 1933 cpu) @ 650/792d (162.18 driver)
default- 8540 (3965 sm2.0, 3941 HDR/sm3.0, 1930 cpu) @ 513/1000d (162.18 driver)
default- 9092 (4257 sm2.0, 4355 HDR/sm3.0, 1933 cpu) @ 650/1000d (162.18 driver)

1600x1200 4xAA(0), Aniso(16)- 5548 (2494 sm2.0, 2064 HDR/sm3.0, 1932 cpu) @ 513/792d (162.18 driver)
1600x1200 4xAA(0), Aniso(16)- 6224 (2912 sm2.0, 2339 HDR/sm3.0, 1926 cpu) @ 650/792d (162.18 driver)
1600x1200 4xAA(0), Aniso(16)- 5869 (2623 sm2.0, 2260 HDR/sm3.0, 1929 cpu) @ 513/1000d (162.18 driver)
1600x1200 4xAA(0), Aniso(16)- 6715 (3156 sm2.0, 2613 HDR/sm3.0, 1931 cpu) @ 650/1000d (162.18 driver)

The 650/1000 doesn't make it an 8800GTX because of the fewer enabled shaders and memory-bus width, but the 650MHz is pretty staggering imo as it is above the stock speed of even an 8800 Ultra (612MHz). I think I've probably been lucky to receive an 8800GTS which clocks as high both in core and memory as it does, but even if it didn't, I would agree with your review that the Leadteks are damn good cards as they are amongst the cheapest.

It pretty much answered my suspicions about factory overclocked cards. That they won't be able to overclock any higher than a random sample from a company which doesn't cherry-pick cores for higher-priced overclocked models.

4 - Posted by Kurtis on August 18, 2007 - 2:58 pm

Nice overclock... Have you tried running a few real games to verify that there are no artifacts? I noticed back when I did the video card reviews that often times you wouldn't see artifacts necessarily in 3DMark but you would in real games.

If you have... congrats on a great buy! :-D

5 - Posted by D.K. on September 1, 2007 - 4:35 pm

I'm looking to purchase a video card, and thanks to the reviews you guys have submitted I have made my decision to buy this card. Thanks heaps!!

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