In Germany a 128-bit version of a GeForce 8800 GT was spotted in e-tail yesterday. The product appears to come from NVIDIA's Dutch AIB partner Point of View. First off, POV makes excellent products, and is a long time review partner from Guru3D. They decided to intro a low cost GeForce 8800 GT for OEM purposes. Here's the deal, according to reference specifications the GeForce 8800 GT is supposed to have it's memory locked at a nice 256-bit memory bus.
The particular G92 based product that POV released is however a 128-bit version. This effective cuts memory bandwidth down in half, and for the 8800 GT that's a lot to coop with. If I run some theoretical numbers you could likely expect the performance drop by 40% overall. It would literally mean say GeForce 8600 GTS / 9600 GSP performance, though you'd think you'd have some more shader processor power and thus would benefit from that here and there. But it doesn't stop there though, the GeForce 8800 GT supposedly should have 112 Stream processors activated, this model has 96 (which the old 8800 GTS had).
Screenshot courtesy of computerbase.de
I asked POV for their take on this product:
"With the introduction of the GeForce 9800 GT we (POV) decided to make a low cost version of the 8800 GT with 32x32 memory which indeed runs at a 128-bit bus. The product was intended for an OEM client of POV, yet made it's way though to e-tail right now. As far as the 96SP's go .. POV right now is checking to see what went wrong in the fabric, as they claim .. it should indeed be 112 SPs.
POV also states that only a handful of these products actually made it into e-tail somehow, they are looking into the fact how the product ended up in e-tail/retail. The one person that actually received and complained about this card, already got it replaced by POV for a proper version."
- SKU code 128-Bit Interface: R-VGA150868
- SKU code 256-Bit Interface: R-VGA150858
It all sounds like a big booboo somewhere down the line of communication. My advice -- if you spot the product, and you get hooked into buying this product completely hypnotized by the price ... check the memory, please make sure it says 256-bit GDDR3 on the box. This product by reference specifications doesn't even come close to a real GeForce 8800 GT in terms of performance.
Warning - GeForce 8800 GT 128-bit | 96 SP spotted !
