Testing

Methodology

For testing GPUs we put them through several synthetic and gaming benchmarks and then repeat the tests after overclocking the card to it's max to see the effects of overclocking.

The benchmarks run were as follows:

• 3Dmark03, 05 and 06
• Half Life 2: Lost coast
• X3 Reunion
• FEAR
• Lost Planet

The PC used for testing this GPU was our new x38 setup:

Since we had previously tested two other cards using this exact test setup, we were able to compare the 8800GT Alpha Dog's scores to theirs. Unfortunately they arn't the most powerful things around; one was an 8600GT, and the other a 2600. These cards are in a whole different price/performance band, but this at least gives some indication of performance difference.

Overclocking

Overclocking the 8800GT isn't the easiest of things to achieve. This Alpha Dog XXX version is already heavily overclocked to 670mhz on the core, and 975mhz (1950mhz effective frequency) on the memory. Using the ever useful ATITool I was able to raise the frequencies to 725 and 1075 respectively. However, this wasn't particularly stable and I had to lower the frequencies down to 695 and 1045 before the GPU was bench stable. This produced less than 5% gains in scores across the board, so overclocked scores do not appear on the results graphs.