Introduction
The GeForce 8800 GT SKU is no stranger to us here at HEXUS, and as our previous reviews have shown we were quite fond of the performance/price powerhouse when it was competing as a high-end solution, selling for £150+.
But time has passed, and following the launch of NVIDIA's 9-series parts the 8800 GT has been repositioned to the mainstream market, competing for your hard-earned cash against its old rival, the ATI Radeon HD 3870 and its newer in-house competitor, the GeForce 9600 GT. Our previous 8800 GT reviews have looked at the cards in the context of a high-end solution, with the benchmarks and comparisons tailored to test their suitability for the most demanding tasks in a high-end PC. In comparison, our mainstream reviews have a less taxing suite of benchmarks, and are tested on a system more appropriately configured for a mid-level PC.
As such, to allow for an apples-to-apples comparison between the 8800 GT and its new-price rivals, we will be testing two pre-overclocked cards; a passively-cooled solution from ECS and an actively-cooled card from Palit, as well as running reference 8800 GT clocks. The premise here is to see how the 8800 GT fares as a mainstream card.