XFX 8800GS Alpha Dog Edition 384MB Review :: XFX 8800GS Alpha Dog Edition Card

The 8800GS Alpha Dog Edition card is a normal sized card with a single slot cooling solution. The day and age of the 9800GTX having two slot cooling solutions does not apply to the target market of this card. The heatsink covers about 2/3 of the length of the front of the card, with a 23 fin fan covering the left portion of the heatsink. The XFX logo rests on the top of the heatsink with the 8800GS Alpha Dog Edition on the bottom.

Card

Heatsink

Fan

Six 64MB DDR3 chips adorn the board, covered by the heatsink. The usual number of memory chips is either four or eight or even sixteen. With 384MB of memory and a 192-bit memory bus, however, the number of chips turned out to be six. The memory clock on this card is 1.7GHz, meaning that the card has a memory bandwidth of 76.8GB/second. It should be interesting to see where the card might benefit from higher memory bandwidth.

SLI Golden Finger

Rear of GPU

Power

Capacitors

NVIDIA introduced their concept of Scalable Link Interface (SLI) in 2004 with the launch of the 6800 Ultra and the nForce 4 SLI motherboard chipset. SLI allows two video cards to work together to improve performance in games and applications. To run in SLI mode, you need two or three like NVIDIA graphics cards, an SLI connector and a SLI-capable motherboard. Some newer cards like the 9800GTX have two golden finger connectors allowing Tri-SLI, but the 8800GS only has one ‘Golden Finger”. So no triple SLI here.

PCI Express Connector

Capacitors

I/O

The XFX 8800GS Alpha Dog Edition card has two Dual Link DVI connectors. For those of us with high-end 30” monitors and above that can do a resolution of 2560x1600, this means that the card can drive two of those monitors at that high resolution. HDMI monitors can be attached with an adapter and analog CRT monitors as well. In this day and age, the analog CRT monitor is almost an anachronism. A HDTV Out port rounds out the connections.