8800GT - RGC of the year|Generella frågor|Forum|Nordichardware

Jag tänkte att jag skulle skriva av mig lite angående nVidias "underbara" 8800GT... Det blev några rader, på engelska. Men eftersom folk här brukar kunna engelska tänkte jag att jag lika gärna kan köra en copy + paste hit. Handlar om min syn på 8800GT, som sagt. 🙂

So, I want nVidia to have an award for their 8800GT. It's a good card, but damn is it downright retarded. Sure, performance is "nice" to say the least - that is if you can get it actually working. Don't get me wrong, I've had four 8800GT's this far, two Gainward reference design cards, one Club3D (reference card with bigger fan) and one Gainward Golden Sample, in-house built by Gainward with a huge decent cooler.

The first point I want to rant about is the cooling. Or the lack of it, actually. I've never in my life seen a cooler as bad as the reference cooler. I mean, even the Club3D card, which has this huge fan (about 80x80x10mm) doesn't cut it; perhaps nVidia should've spent more than $.3 on the cooler which consists of three pieces of aluminum and weighs 50 grams. No wonder it doesn't cool, no matter what fan you have. "But duh, it has a copper base!" - sure it does, but all it does is add those extra 45 grams to the total cooler weight... The card gets sickeningly hot while benching/gaming, 90 degrees centigrade is not unusual, it's actually common. No matter what the fan speed, no matter what fan.

Besides, nVidia thought "what the hell, we have this crappy cooler, let's compensate for it by putting on like a quarter of a ton of crappy thermal paste!". This of course even worsens performance, all it does is f*ck with all enthusiasts wanting to change their cooler, they'll have to spend 45 minutes cleaning out the thermal paste. This pisses me off.

But actually, that's not the worst thing about the GT. No, that's right, I said it. It's the damn incompatibility with pretty much everything PCI-E. I've tried the reference GT's on three boards, P5K, P5K Pro and the GA-P35-DS3R. On each of the boards, you randomly boot up to discover that all your PCI-E bandwidth is gone by checking CPUZ and discovering your link width is down to 1x instead of 16x. This is a problem I've been having with the reference boards only; the Golden Sample Card from Gainward doesn't have this issue at all to my knowledge. It might be a two-slot solution, but who gives a flying f*ck when your temperatures are decent and you actually can boot your system up without fearing to have to reboot it fifteen times because of the link width.

I believe the problem is only with PCI-E 1 motherboards, as the 8800GT is designed for PCI-E 2.0, nVidia somehow manages to f*ck some compatibility up in some way, I don't quite understand it.

So, if you're about to buy the Retarded Graphics Card of the year, the 8800GT, make sure you buy a non-reference card, or you'll be in for a whole lot of headache. I'm having this problem right now, but it's not that I'm pissed because of the PCI-E width being 1x at the moment, no. It's because the card seems to like messing with my other things, such as my WiFi card and soundcard, making sound playback choppy if I even think of watching some video or sometimes even scroll!

That's my point of view on the 8800GT. I'm not at all satisfied. And mind you, I've spent 10k SEK on four of these f*ckers.

Originaltråd: https://www.nordichardware.com.....t9539.html