Box Content

The PNY is pretty basic in terms of supplied extras, this is definitely a card that you would buy if you already have a stash of games. In the box you get a driver CD, Quick Setup Guide, D-Sub to DVI adapter, standard power to PCI-Express power converter an adaptor to provide S-Video, Video and composite component.

Design/Spec

The board is based on the Nvidia reference design but has a large heat-sink and fan. It's also relatively slim compared to a lot of cards we have seen.

Also the card starts off loud - when you first boot up the PC - but then drops down within a few seconds to almost inaudible levels.

Specification

- Bus Connector: PCI-Express
- Outputs: 2xDVI-I DUAL LINK HDTV-OUT
- Core Clock: 600 MHz
- Memory Clock: 900Mhz
- Memory Capacity: 512MB
- Memory Interface: 256-bit GDDR3
- Memory Bandwidth: 57.6GB/s
- Fill Rate (texels/sec.): 33.6 Billion
- TV-out: YES
- Cooling system: Fan
- DirectX: DX10

Performance

To be honest the difference in performance between our 7800 GTX card running on our MESH Test PC and this card is phenomenal, literally blowing the other card out of the water.

First of all we used the latest Nvidia drivers available to the date of the review and all the games were patched to their latest release version. We first tested using the standard 3D mark 06 bench mark in both Vista and XP and it scored an impressive 11853 (XP) which compared to our 7800GTX -which scored 4789 - is a vast improvement.

Then we used Fraps in XP and ran through some outdoor action packed levels for around 3 minutes in the following games, Unreal Tournament III, Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts, Call of Duty 4 and Crysis and from this we got the Average Frames Per Second (FPS) score.

In the gallery you will see some screen shots of the settings we used when testing.

We found the card could run Crysis with high settings at 1280 x 1024 at 36fps, before we were getting 28fps on our older 7800GTX at low settings.

In Call of Duty 4 we ran our tests on the excellent "All Ghilled up" level and at 1280 x 1024 and 4 x Anti-aliasing we were getting an average of 70fps.

For Company of Heroes we ran the internal performance test and got an average of 59.2fps running at 4 x AA with all setting set to high or ultra.

Overclocking

With the performance on offer there is not much point in overclocking the card, but we did put it through its paces to see if we could gain additional performance.

For overclocking we used Nvidia's own "ntune" program and set the fan speed to automatic and raised the GPU clock speed to 650 from 600Mhz and the memory to 998 from 900Mhz. We then ran through the same test level in COD4 and re-ran 3DMark 06.

In COD4 we got an extra 5ps, with the average going up to 75 FPS; however we noticed the temperature was hitting nearly 70 degrees centigrade.

In 3Dmark 06 the score went up to 12109, so there is a noticeable difference.

Because of the temperature issues we set the fan speed to manual (70% speed) for the next test, which of course raised the noise from the card but it was not noticeable in the game.

The GPU was then set to 676Mhz from 600 and the memory went from 900 to 1020mhz and we noticed nearly 8-10 fps more speed in COD4 and the 3DMark 06 score went to 12212, but the temperature only rose to a max of 63 degrees this time, so we recks you could get even more performance out of the card if you wanted to.

We must point out that our case already contained 2 x 120mm cooling fans and was made from aluminium - which does help with the cooling. So only overclock if your setup is able to cope.