Leadtek WinFast PX8800GT 256MB (GeForce 8800 GT 256MB)

By Vincent Chang
Category : Graphics
Published by Vijay Anand on Thursday, 27th December, 2007
Rating : 4 out of 5 stars

NVIDIA's Year

As 2007 draws to a close, it's that time of the year again. Nope, we're not talking about the holiday cheer but rather, that brief moment of retrospection as we step back and review what has gone by in the past 12 months. And what better way to summarize the year than to compile lists. You should be familiar now with all the top lists that the media produce at this time of the year. We too have our own version of the best products of the year.

So it's not surprising that most publications are dishing out awards as fast as they can before the year ends. What was quite unexpected to us was this: Forbes, as mainstream and Wall Street a publication you can get, has recently named NVIDIA as its Company of the Year. Now, it's not that we disagree with the award. Rather, we were taken aback because there are many more higher profile tech companies than NVIDIA out there. Names like Apple and Intel for instance that experienced a stellar year too. NVIDIA must have done something pretty spectacular to have earned this accolade.

One of the reasons why this year belonged to NVIDIA lies in our hands now - the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT. While this GPU probably came too late this year to make too much of an impact on its market share, it does bring a level of performance unprecedented for its price and should ensure steady growth through the early months of 2008. No doubt, ATI has its own price competitive Radeon HD 3800 series to match but it has long lost the initiative and the market share reflects this, with 62% of the PC desktop graphics for NVIDIA.

The Leadtek WinFast PX8800GT 256MB.

Of course, NVIDIA too has had its woes, though it's a happy problem of not having enough G92 based graphics cards to meet demand (akin to the lack of Wii consoles to satisfy all demand). Nevertheless, it has gone ahead with the 256MB version of this popular GPU as it has previously announced and you should already be seeing this on retail shelves. Does having 256MB of memory cripple the fast GPU? We'll take a look after the technical specifications below:

Leadtek WinFast PX8800GT 256MB Technical Specifications

Graphics Engine	NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT GPU (G92) 754 million transistors 3D GPU clock = 600MHz 112 Stream Processors at 1500MHz NVIDIA Unified Architecture GigaThread technology Full support for Microsoft DirectX 10 Geometry shaders Geometry instancing Streamed output Shader Model 4.0 Full 128-bit floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline NVIDIA Lumenex Technology 16x full screen anti-aliasing Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling 16x angle independent anisotropic filtering 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting with anti-aliasing 32-bit per component floating point texture filtering and blending Advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data Support for normal map compression Z-cull Early-Z NVIDIA Quantum Effects Technology Advanced shader processors architected for physics computation Simulate and render physics effects on the graphics processor NVIDIA SLI Technology NVIDIA PureVideo HD Technology Dedicated on-chip video processor (VP2) High-definition H.264, VC-1, MPEG2 and WMV9 decode acceleration Advanced spatial-temporal de-interlacing HDCP capable Spatial-Temporal De-Interlacing Noise Reduction Edge Enhancement Bad Edit Correction Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction) High-quality scaling Video color correction Microsoft Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) support Advanced Display Functionality Two dual-link DVI outputs for digital flat panel display resolutions up to 2560x1600 Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for analog display resolutions up to and including 2048x1536 at 85Hz Integrated HDTV encoder provides analog TV-output (Component/Composite/S-Video) up to 1080i resolution NVIDIA nView multi-display technology capability 10-bit display processing Built for Windows Vista Full DirectX 10 support Dedicated graphics processor powers the new Windows Vista Aero 3D user interface VMR-based video architecture Designed for PCI Express 2.0 Designed for high-speed GDDR3 memory Advanced thermal monitoring and thermal management
Graphics Memory	256-bit memory interface 256MB Graphics DDR3 SDRAM Default clock rate of 900MHz (effective speed of 1800MHz DDR)
Display Capabilities	Dual 400MHz RAMDACs that support resolutions of 2048x1536@85Hz Dual-link DVI capability to drive displays of up to 2560x1600
Connectors	1 x mini-DIN connector (for Video-out) 2 x DVI-I connector (HDCP Ready)
Drivers & Software	Driver support for Microsoft Windows Vista/9x/ME/2000/XP/XP MCE/XP Pro x64, Linux and Macintosh OS (including OS X) PowerDVD 7.0 Orb Neverwinter Nights 2
Other Information	PCI Express x16 slot required Dedicated 6-pin PCIe Molex power connector required (not shared or split) Power supply rated for 400W or higher recommended by NVIDIA0