Inno3D GeForce 8800 GTX Overclocked (I-88GTX-K5JTCSX)

As if a GeForce 8800 GTX wasn't fast enough, Inno3D has taken NVIDIA's second most powerful card (at the time of review) and ramped up the clock speeds for a little extra kick. Instead of its usual core clock speed of 575MHz, the Inno3D has a core clock of 590MHz and the memory has been beefed up to 950MHz (1900MHz effective speed).

Beyond this the card remains much the same, using the stock cooler and reference board. As with other 8800 GTX cards there is 768MB of GDDR3 memory, a 384-bit memory bus and 128 stream processors with a shader clock speed of 1350MHz. With the increased memory speed, the card manages a memory throughput of 91.2GBps. Naturally it supports DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0.

In our benchmarks we saw some very nice results, though we saw very little or no improvement over 8800 GTX cards running at the standard clock speed. Fortunately the price tag on this card is a mere $10 more than the same Inno3D card running at the stock speeds.

We ran a host of tests, all of which include DirectX 9 (DX9) features and some that also include some DirectX 10 (DX10) features. First on the list is 3DMark 2006. Using the default settings the Inno3D 8800 GTX scored 11,261. Cranking the resolution up to 1920x1200 with 8x antialiasing (AA) and 16x anisotropic filtering dropped the score down to 5746.

In FEAR with maximum quality and 4x AA at 1600x1200 it averaged 80fps (frames per second). In Half-Life 2 at the maximum quality settings using 1920x1200 it averaged a solid 122.7fps.

In Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, using DX10 and the game's recommended settings (mostly high, but not ultra) on 1920x1200 we got an average of 34.5fps. When we turned everything onto the highest possible quality the game struggled a little and averaged just 15fps.

More on the DX10 front, we tested the card using the DX10 version of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. Using the default settings it averaged a comfortable 77.6fps, but with every DX10 feature turned on and the resolution increased from 1280x960 to 1920x1200 the average dropped to 31.9fps.

As usual the card runs fairly quietly, at least by gaming card standards, and never gets excessively hot, but will require some decent cooling in hotter environments or for hardware-packed PC cases. Bundled with the Inno3D is a copy of Tomb Raider Anniversary, two D-Sub to DVI adapters, a component adapter and a composite adapter. There's also an adapter converting two Molex power cables to one PCIe power cable, as this card requires two PCIe power cables to run.