Introduction
Palit is a new to the US company that has been churning out enthusiast level graphics cards in Europe and Asia that are starting to turn heads here in the states, and for good reason. Palit puts great thought and engineering into each of their products and it shows. From the PCB up, Palit marches to the beat of its own drum, meaning no reference model designs here. This speaks well to the old adage of “listening to your customers.” So while you might spend a little more money than on a similar product from other vendors, it’s not the same design as other companies offerings with a “me too” game and bundle. Legit Review’s first experience with Palit hardware was with their 9600 GT Sonic. The card featured a unique Orange cooling solution along with increased core and memory speeds. It also came with a who’s who of connectors, including dual Dual Link DVI, DisplayPort, HDMI, and even an optical SPDIF. Right there, the little extra money you spent may be the perfect investment for those that don’t upgrade their video card that often, but may be looking at a new monitor with one of these connectors. Most times you would have to locate and purchase a special edition of an existing card at an inflated price to get HDMI and/or DisplayPort.
So while we thought highly of the 9600 GT Sonic, Palit had more in store for us. They recently sent along a pair of their own “limited edition” graphics cards based on the 8800 GTS 512, only with 1GB of memory on each one. These cards also ship with higher clock speeds, not only the core but memory also. Paired with the great cooling heatsink and card design the Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is a dream-come-true for high-end gamers.
The first thing you spot on the Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is that orange casing on the card. You might also notice that it has a red PCB which youd expect to find on an ATI card, but rarely see on NVIDIA flavors. Like all 8800 GTS cards the Palit 1GB is a dual slot design that only requires a single PCI-e power connector.
Moving around to the backside of our card we see something radically different, a giant back plate that also functions as a heatspreader for the additional memory added to the back side of the card. However, we ran into a couple of challenges due to this, more on that later.
At the heart of our 8800 GTS is the G92 core clocked at 730 MHz which is a generous step up from the 650MHz that comes on most 8800 GTS 512MB cards. Not only does our card have double the memory, it’s clocked higher than the standard 512MB cards as well, coming in at 2100MHz versus 1940MHz for the standard card.
Finally, out back we see that our cards have the standard connections with dual Dual-Link DVI and the S-Video style connector that allows you to connect an adaptor to it to display on a display with RGB connections.
Box, Bundle, and Test Setup
The box Palit ships the 8800 GTS 1GB in is pretty nice looking and very prominently displays what type of card it is, that it is overclocked, and the fact that it’s a limited edition.
On the back of the box there is a nice table of assorted 8000 and 7000 series cards and what is best for certain applications. This is a nice touch for those that dont follow graphics cards closely and just need an idea of what they should be looking for.
The included bundle is quite nice as they have included a DVI to D-Sub adaptor, a DVI to HDMI adaptor, a molex to PCI-E 6-pin adaptor, and the fore mentioned RGB connector. We also have the usual “Quick Install Guide” that covers installing the card and drivers, the driver CD, and they also included Tomb Raider: Anniversary. I haven’t yet had time to fire it up but if it’s anything like TR: Legend it will be a lot of fun!
Right, so let’s get to why we are writing this article, how do these bad boys perform?!
Test Setup
The test system was running Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit with all available Microsoft updates including the hotfixes required for enthusiast video cards to run correctly. NVIDIA Forceware 169.28 beta drivers were used on all of the GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB graphics cards. All results shown in the charts are averages of at least three runs from each game or application used. Memory timings were set to 1000MHz 4-5-4-15.
Call of Juarez
Call of Juarez is a Western-themed first-person shooter from the Polish developer Techland. First released for Windows in 2006 as a DirectX 9 title, it was re-released on June 12, 2007 as a DirextX 10 game title. Call of Juarez was one of the first games to utilize Microsofts DirectX 10 and it is included in our testing for this reason.
Benchmark Results: As you can see this benchmark pushes DirectX 10 graphics cards to the breaking point with high quality settings at 2560x1600. Our Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is significantly faster than the 8800 GTS 512MB in this benchmark and outpaces the 8800 GTX both in single card, and SLI.
Call of Duty 4
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a first-person shooter developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision for Xbox 360 , Playstation 3 and PC. It is the fourth installment in the Call of Duty video game series. It was announced on April 25, 2007 and was released on November 6, 2007 in North America. The single player game can be completed in well under seven hours, but the graphics are awesome.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare runs on a proprietary graphics engine, and has features such as true world-dynamic lighting, HDR lighting effects, dynamic shadows and depth-of-field. "Bullet Penetration" is calculated by the engine, taking into account things such as surface type and entity thickness. Certain objects, such as cars, and some buildings are destructible. This makes distinguishing cover from concealment important, as meager protection such as wooden fences, thin walls and such no longer provide sufficient protection. The bullets speed and stopping power are decreased after penetrating an object, and this decrease is calculated realistically depending on the thickness and surface of the object penetrated. The game also makes use of a physics engine, which was not implemented in previous Call of Duty titles for the PC. Death Animations are a combination of pre-set animations and ragdoll physics. Some mistook the games graphics to be DirectX 10 based, but it is stated that the graphics use DirectX 9.
Results: Once again with Call of Duty 4 we see SLI add tremendous playability at maximum in-game settings with 4xAA. We see again that the Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is neck and neck with the 8800 GTX, and is just slightly faster in SLI.
3DMark 2006
3DMark 2006 3DMark 06 is the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking and the latest version in the popular 3DMark series! 3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, advanced SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today.
Benchmark Results: At the default resolution of 1280x1024 we see that both of the 8800 GTS cards are faster than the 8800 GTX. In SLI that lead grows just a little more. If you live and die by your 3D Mark score the newer G92 core cards are for you.
Benchmark Results: With the monitor resolution cranked up to 2560x1600 we see much of the same with the GTX at the bottom of 3D Mark scoring. Again, this is why its very important to look at other tests instead of relying solely on 3D Mark.
Overclocking & Conclusion
Overclocking
With the card coming clocked at such high speeds already, we weren’t expecting much of an overclock. I’m still unhappy with most of the overclocking tools available in Vista so we went with a new program that Palit has developed, the VDO Tool. This program is on the driver CD included with their Sonic line of graphics cards. After a bit of testing different speeds we settled in at 783MHz core, and 2250MHz memory. While this isn’t a huge increase it is still an impressive 53MHz core and 150MHz memory increase over an already substantial overclock. We were able to maintain these speeds while blasting through Call of Duty 4 at 2560x1600 during multiplayer madness! As you can see in the picture below, there are a lot of options including full fan control, as well as Core, Memory, and even independent Shader clock sliders!!
You can see above the temperature that the card reached while running a short stress test. We were never able to break 60c even while gaming for hours. If this were an aftermarket cooling solution it would be considered one of the best on the market, the fact that its on a retail card from the factory makes it all the more impressive! Kudos to Palit for including a great cooling solution.
Conclusion
First off, we have to dish out our dislikes about the card, and its an extremely short list.
Beneath the back plate is the additional 512MB of memory that makes these cards unique. Keeping that memory cool requires the heat spreader. This is the only qualm that we have with these cards, the back plate/heat spreader causes a few issues on motherboards with capacitors on the top side of the PCI-E slot. On the 780i motherboard used in our testing we had to tilt the capacitor to get the card to fit. The next problem we ran into was adding the second card for SLI in our 780i meant we had to use 16x PCI-E slot number 3. In itself, this isn’t a huge ordeal but there are going to be boards out there that will not be compatible with this card. A quick list would be most 939 nForce 4 boards when running SLI and the Intel "Bad Axe" line even with only a single card due to the memory slots being so close. A quick stroll through Newegg shows that some 650i SLI boards may be affected as well. The back plate isn’t all bad though, as it does function well as a heat spreader and protects all of those tiny resistors on the backside of the card. Anyone that has accidentally knocked one of those off an 8800 GTX knows how horrible a feeling that can be (yes, that would be me).
Overall the card is a great performer that consumes less power and therefore puts out less heat. At times in SLI it outperforms the 8800 GTX SLI and even 3 of them in triple SLI but it’s not a consistent win across the board in single card or SLI configurations. Obviously if you’ve got an 8800 GTX or Ultra a Palit 8800 GTS 1GB is not going to be much of a change aside from power and heat. For those with large LCD’s or who have CRT’s capable of high resolutions and building a new system or upgrading from just about any ATI card, and NVIDIA cards lower than the 8800 series I would recommend a Palit 8800 GTS 1GB.
There is also something else special about these cards that we will be seeing in the near future, and that is that the clock speeds these cards carry is faster than the rumored speeds of the forthcoming 9800 GTX, which is rumored to use the same core. While nothing can be confirmed until the 9800 GTX becomes available, anyone buying a Palit 8800 GTS 1GB can rest assured that they are getting a very high quality card and top of the line performance at a great price. Our Palit 8800 GTS 1GB Sonic is priced at $369 at the time of this article. As games become more and more dependent on the size of the frame buffer, graphics cards will steadily keep increasing memory size and I have no doubt we’ll be seeing 1GB of memory arriving on all high end video cards very soon.
Credit By www.legitreviews.com
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