BFG 8800 GTs

[The Halk]

BFG 8800 GTX - Underperforming?

Trying to decide between graphics cards since I've got a week off and it's upgrade time.

I see BFG do an OC and OC2. Are these both reference designs, i.e. will a waterblock produced to reference design work on both of these?

And are the OC2s the same as the OCs, just better binned chips?

 

[The Halk]

Oh. And the other thing.... If I decided to go GTS not GTX, I see there's both 320MB and 640MB flavours. Given that I'll be running 1920x1200, will the 320MB be insufficient?

 

[Tooks]

All the benchies I've seen show the 8800GTS 320MB struggling a bit at resolutions over 1600 x 1200, so I'd think you'd be better off with the 640MB version.

The difference between the OC and OC2 is just clock speeds, OC2 being 30mhz faster on the core, and 100mhz on the shader and memory clocks.

The waterblock should fit either as they are both reference designs.

 

[The Halk]

BFG OC2 8800 GTX ordered.

My bank balance just went into freefall

 

[Mortster]

BFG OC2 8800 GTX ordered.

My bank balance just went into freefall

excellent choice mate.
you will love the card!

 

[The Halk]

Thought I'd love it, until I ran 3dmark 06 and got a score of 3586. Now I've got to work out what's gone wrong...

 

[melbourne720]

Thought I'd love it, until I ran 3dmark 06 and got a score of 3586. Now I've got to work out what's gone wrong...

What was the score breakdown? That is about 30% of what you should be getting

 

[The Halk]

Well, had assumed running a safe mode driver cleaner would sort it out. I even did the chipset :/

Ran it again, here's the breakdown

3582 3D Marks
SM2.0 1468
HDR/SM3.0 1561
CPU 1096

Running an Operon 146 at 2.8GHz. Memory runs at 230 and has reasonable timings, it's 2GB of Mushkin Redline.

Can't understand why it's so low.

 

[Biglunn]

Your CPU score is alarmingly low - I get over 2700 with my E6400 @ 3.2. That may be the root cause - there is no way my processor is nearly 3 times more powerful than yours. Do some CPU benchmarks in SiSoft Sandra to eliminate any possible incorrect CPU setting.

 

[The Halk]

Yep, running the CPU tests I get less than 1 FPS.

No idea off hand what SuperPi should be - that'll do to test the CPU.

What should I be coming out with roughly on 1mil?

 

[Biglunn]

its normal to have those sort of CPU scores in 3Dmark2k6 - I get about 0.9FPS in test 1 and 1.4FPS in test 2

 

[The Halk]

According to Sandra my CPU is perfoming exactly as an FX-57 would. There's not even a percentage point in it.

I did, however, look at other processors, and Sandra has an E6600 2.4GHz as up to 3 times as fast as what it has the FX-57.

So maybe there isn't a problem.

Next week an Opteron 185 is arriving, it should do 3GHz easily enough, so that'll more than double the processing power available.