The tendency to increase the presence of models with the G92 chip on the market is quite logical in the chain of events. Although they are still outnumbered on the market, the new GeForce 8800 GT and GTS cards are very good and asked for. And as we couldn't find a single GeForce 8800 GTS with 512MB of memory so far, we decided to plunder a little, and dug out an XFX model. This particular version frpom XFX is actually their standard version, whereas XFX also has some special pre-overclocked editions which offer better performance but going for a little more money. So if you can afford a bit more it might be wise to also check out the tweaked version, before making up your mind. - InsideHW

XFX GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) Alpha Dog Card Review

In a very nice, XFX typical black box, all of the prerequisites are neatly packed, cables, driver discs, a connector and so on. Since this is an Alpha Dog edition, the card comes bundled with the Company of Heroes game as well, which is certainly commendable. After the packaging, we moved on to the card. As you can see, XFX has decided to go with the flow, meaning to employ the reference card design with no extravagant cooler solutions or anything like that. Even the sticker on the card is the default NVIDIA sticker. The cooling profile is much bigger than the one on the GeForce 8800 GT, which is to be expected.

This revision of the G92 has no parts turned off and works at higher clocks, which inevitably turns up the heat. Aluminium was used as the main material for the cooling body and has a heat dispersing heatpipe. A blower fan is in charge of keeping the passive parts cool, and although it is perhaps a bit on the noisy side, it turned out to be working very well. It is only after an extensive period of gaming that the fan will have to increase its speed, bringing the card out of its stealth mode, during which you won't be noticing its fan. The new card has a slightly more complex GPU, since it has a fully functional G92 on itself.

Unlike the GeForce 8800 GT with its 112 stream processors, this card has 128 of them. Also, the number of texture units is 64, which is great and really makes it a monster in texture fillrate tests, but also very efficient in newer games and higher relosutions. Both the GPU and the shader clocks have been increased to 650MHz and 1625MHz respectively. This makes this GPU even more powerful than the G80 present on the GeForce 8800 GTX cards, which is still the best NVIDIA has to offer. The weaker, though less important side of these cards is their 256-bit memory bus, but in the end not a crucial factor.

As far as memory is concerned, it is of GDDR3 type, with a response time of 1.0ns and clock value of 1940MHz. After our limited benchmarks, we reached a conclusion that this solution is very good and NVIDIA engineers definitely knew what they were doing. Performance results are great, even better than the GeForce 8800 GTX in some cases. We had no doubts whatsoever, that the G92 will be a great choice in all of its variations. And just by the way, for gamers who are not financially strong enough to buy this sort of card, you can always opt for the GeForce 8800 GS version.