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Currently the average GeForce 8800 GTX is priced around the $650 US price mark, making it extremely expensive. The GeForce GTS on the other hand is considerably cheaper costing $380 US, and while this is hardly cheap, a saving of $270 US is quite substantial. Over the past few months I have done a considerable amount of benchmarking with the GeForce 8800 GTX, and it has been difficult to create a computer that is capable of exploiting the full potential of this graphics card. Although this graphics card can deliver breathtaking performance with an Intel Pentium D 930 processor, it is far more spectacular with an E6700 for example.  When upgrading from a $150 US Pentium D 930 processor to a gutsy Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 processor, which costs $500 US, even higher frame rates become available. The question is how much do you have to spend in order to reap the full benefits of owning a GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card? Furthermore, at what point does the GTX become pointless and are you better off with the GTS? By now we all know that the E6700 enjoys working with the 8800 GTX, but how much slower is the GTS when paired with this processor and what is the difference when using a slower Core 2 Duo? Previous tests have proven that when using slower processors, such as a Pentium D 930 for example, there are still ways of making the GeForce 8800 GTX work hard. This is done by forcing the GeForce to utilize its extreme memory bandwidth. By maxing out not only the resolution but also the FSAA and Aniso settings, the GeForce 8800 GTX really has to go to work and with a processor such as a Pentium D 930, the average frame rate is not greatly affected. This article will test the GeForce 8800 GTX with the maximum FSAA and Aniso settings enabled with the highest level of in game quality settings. There are a range of processors right now that I could use to test the scaling performance of the GeForce 8800 graphics card, but I feel there are none better than the Core 2 Duo series, for the moment anyway. That said, I have also included some Athlon64 X2 processors as well, but I must stress this is not an AMD vs. Intel comparison. Rather we will be looking at how the processors frequency impacts the performance of the GeForce 8800 graphics card. This will help users decide if they can get away with a cheaper processor or will they need to spend big? Furthermore, we will look at the performance difference between the GTX and GTS using lower clocked processors and then of course the flagship models. |
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