The test system with the NX8800GT installed is pictured below. Note that the graphics card uses a single-slot cooling solution. Since the GeForce 8800 GT GPU can reach temperatures up to 100 °C at full load (at the default fan speed at 29%), an adequately ventilated case is an important consideration.

MSI NX8800GT Installed

GPUs are designed with a number of fail safe mechanisms to prevent damage due to overheating. One line of defense is at the driver level, which can throttle clock speeds if the GPU exceeds a specific temperature. Additional safeguards are present at the hardware level through voltage regulation or the GPU can automatically shut down.

Hardware and Operating System

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 - 3.0GHz Conroe Core - 4MB L2 Cache - 1333MHz FSB
• BFG nForce 680i SLI Motherboard
• 4GB Corsair XMS PC8500 DDR2 SDRAM 5-5-5-18-2T @ 400MHz
• Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
• PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW-SR Power Supply
• Dell 3007WFP LCD Monitor
• Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 / DirectX 9.0c
• Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit / DirectX 10

Graphics Cards, Drivers, and Driver Settings

• MSI NX8800GT - 660MHz Core / 1650MHz Shader / 950MHz Memory (1900MHz Effective)
• GeForce 8800 GTX - 576MHz Core / 1350MHz Shader / 900MHz Memory (1800MHz Effective)
• ForceWare Beta 169.01 - Windows XP
• ForceWare Beta 169.04 - Windows Vista
• 32-Bit Color
• Vsync Disabled
• 60Hz Refresh Rate
• High Quality Texture Filtering
• Gamma Correct Antialiasing

Test Applications

• BioShock
• Company of Heroes
• Crysis Demo
• Dark Messiah
• Doom 3
• Far Cry
• F.E.A.R.
• Gothic 3 Demo
• Lost Planet
• Oblivion
• Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
• Unreal Tournament 3 Demo
• World in Conflict Demo

Notes

• Antialiasing was set to "Override any application setting" in the driver for Oblivion.
• Anisotropic filtering was set to 8x in the driver for Oblivion.

Next Page: Game Settings 1