GeForce 8800 GTS Review: Perfect Budget Windows 7 Card

$50 sounds almost too little to pay for a much-improved gaming or HD video experience, but that's all the GeForce 8800 GTS costs. It's the cheapest GPU on the market that's compatible with DirectX 10, and it more than holds its own with cards that cost as much as three times its price. The GeForce 8800 GTS definitely owns the competition in regards to value.

Unified architecture is the name of the game with the upgrade from the GeForce 7900's to the GeForce 8800 GTS. Nvidia didn't bother with changing from the 90nm card; it just started using stream processors, which do pixel, vertex, physics and geometry calculations, instead of dedicated portions for different processes. Stream processing is more efficient in that it uses more of the card's resources at one time instead of letting them sit idle. Compared to the 8800 GTX, the GeForce 8800 GTS has a slower clock core, less video RAM and fewer processors (96 to the GTX's 128).

However, the GeForce 8800 GTS doesn't use as much power as the GTX. 400 watts is the recommended PSU for a GTS, with 450 watts for the GTX. Plus, the GTS only needs one connection to the PSU and is shorter while the GTX needs two and is longer.

In performance, the GeForce 8800 GTS held its own. It trailed the GTX by 19% on 3DMark, finishing between the GeForce 7900 GTX and single Radeon X1950 XTX setups and the SLI and CrossFire configurations. That's about what we expected, but it surprised us by beating the ATI Crossfire and Nvidia SLI configurations while watching Oblivion of The Elder Scrolls IV, Carbon of Need for Speed, and on Company of Heroes. We switched to F.E.A.R., Quake 4 and Half-Life 2, and the Radeon X1950 XT on CrossFire mode came out on top. Even topping for three out of six games in frame speed is anomalous for a card that costs less than half of the others.

With anisotropic and anti-aliasing in use at high resolutions, the power of the GeForce 8800 GTS is even more impressive. We did the test for Episode One of Half-Life 2 at 2048x1536 resolution and the GeForce 8800 GTS dropped very few frames even when the AA was up at 16x. The frame retention rates for the SLI and Crossfire were half at best.

The GeForce 8800 GTS is obviously a worthwhile investment for non-gamers who don't have monitors of 30" or more, although gamers should probably drop the extra $100 for the GTX. The GeForce 8800 GTS is a very good graphics card that will wow you with its performance.