The first thing that struck me about both the 8800GTS and the 8800GTX cards was the cooling system and length of the card. The card is a little shorter than the ASUS 8800GTX and that’s a good thing. Fitting the card in the case we use for video card testing was easy and without issue, the 8800GTX required inserting the card sideways. The length of the card is about the same as a X1950XTX card from ATI.

The cooling fan on the 8800GTS is the same as that found on the ASUS 8800GTX a 29-fin fan that blows air through the funnel that is the heatsink on the card out through a grill on the card’s back plate. The heatsink covers the memory chips, keeping all components on the card cool in operation.

The 8800GTS is a PCI Express native card. Its unlikely NVIDIA will release the 8800GTS or GTX to the AGP platform which is dead in the water due to the advent of PCI Express. The 8800GTS has a single PCI Express power plug. Note that the 8800GTX has 2 PCI Express power plugs, the first commercially available video card to do so.

The memory configuration of the 8800GTS is quite different. 10 512kilobit memory chips are present, giving a 320-bit memory bus and 640MB of memory. The 8800GTS and 8800GTX have moved away from multiples of four memory chips and the 256-bit memory bus. The clock speed of the EVGA 8800GTS memory is 1.6GHz, meaning with a 320-bit memory bus that the memory bandwidth on the card is a theoretical 64GB. Once we get to the performance area, you’ll notice areas where more memory bandwidth would be better.