In an all black OEM design there isn’t a whole lot to see when faced straight on with the 8800GTS. Unlike the 8800GT we find ourselves with a dual slot cooler which carries with it a bigger fan.
This generally means two things for us, less noise and better cooling. The cooler of course takes up pretty much the whole front of the card with only a PCI Express port showing at the bottom.
The design of the card is all very standard for today’s generation. Heading to the right of the card we have a single PCI Express power connector between the plastic from the heatsink and the PCB.
As you would expect we have only a single SLI connector sitting across the top of the card which we unfortunately won’t be making use of today. It’s possible that we’ve seen the last of the dual connector design for the 8 series. It will be interesting to see if it pops up in the next generation of NVIDIA cards due out early next year.
Moving onto the I/O side of things we continue with the very standard lay out, Dual DVI connectors of which both offer Dual Link connectivity with a maximum resolution of up to 2560 x 1600, and our little TV-Out port. AMD continue to offer Video In/Video Out (VIVO) on their high-end cards and NVIDIA continue not to offer it. For the most part we don’t think it’s that important of a feature but the inclusion of it on the AMD offerings is a nice one nonetheless.
Talking Spec
Getting down to the nitty gritty there are some key details we should make mention of. Based on the new G92 core, we have the standard features to come with it such as PCI Express 2.0, a 65nm die and 1:1 texture addressing units : texture filtering units.
These are the features we know to be standard across all of the upcoming 8800GTS G92 based graphics cards, but as far as model specifics go we have in this case 512MB of GDDR3 memory. That 512MB comes clocked in at 1940MHz DDR while the core and shader clocks come in at 650MHz and 1625MHz respectively.
The memory bus comes in at a reduced 256-bit like the 8800GT, which is oddly enough down from the original 8800GTS 320/640 which had with it a 320-bit bus.
Not all is lost though! To put the speed into comparison the 8800GT sports 512MB of DDR3 memory at 1800MHz DDR and with a core speed of 600MHz. The 320MB/640MB DDR3 8800GTS cards came in with a memory speed of 1600MHz DDR and a core speed of 500MHz.
