Power Consumption
The XFX GeFORCE 8800 GTS XXX 320MB uses roughly the same amount of power that ATI's high-end card does. While the XXX tops them both out at nearly 300W draw, you'll need a pretty hefty power supply if you want to use any of XFX's G80 cards.
Final Thoughts
The XFX GeFORCE 8800 GTS XXX 320MB spec sheet indicated great promise for a card retailing for $349. With nearly identical specifications as the GTS 640MB with half the RAM, the GTS XXX 320MB trounced the Asus GeFORCE 7950GT in benchmarks. The Asus GeFORCE 7950GT (which retails for about $270) should quickly start to subside, as will all previous generation cards, when people start to notice the cheaper G80 cards.
When comparing the XFX GeFORCE 8800 GTS XXX 320MB to the regular BFG GeFORCE 8800 GTS, the XFX card scored higher in most of the games we tested thanks to its higher clock and memory speeds. Really, I don't see any purpose of getting a regular GTS unless it has some extreme undocumented overclocking threshold and newer games really start to take advantage of practical Video RAM usage. In the more recent games in our benchmarking line-up, X3 and Company of Heroes, you can see the BFG card closing the gap where RAM dependancy is more crucial, and other reviews have shown that memory intensive games like Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter start larger performance gaps between the 640MB and 320MB variants of the 8800GTS cards. In our case, we took the cards to the limit and pushed resolutions up to 2048x1536 to test NVIDIA's claims that the 320MB edition of the card can deliver a smooth gaming performance no different than the 640MB 8800GTS at anything up to 1920x1200. In our case we don't actually have the 1920x1200 going, but you can sure bet that 2048x1536 is a LOT more pixels to process, and even under those conditions few of our test suite really showed the 320MB as lacking even with AA and AF turned up. That's a heck of an achievement.
Now when comparing the XFX GeFORCE 8800 GTS XXX 320MB to the XFX's G80 cards, there is the price to performance issue. While the 8800GTS 320MB version retails for $349, the GTX XXX cost nearly double at $649. What this means is that for now the XFX GeFORCE 8800 GTS XXX 320MB is perhaps the best card to purchase price-to-performance wise. Concerning only existing games, the 320MB version doesn't experience many (if any at all) problems despite its RAM shortage. One game that comes to mind that might cause some problems is Obilivon where RAM caching for large texture models may tax the card more so than something with more dedicated memory. XFX's GeFORCE 8800 GTS XXX 640MB differs from the object of this review in three big ways. First, the 320MB core is actually clocked faster (580MHz) than the 640MB card, according to XFX's own specs. Second is the obvious RAM difference and third is the price, 320MB costing $349 and 640MB $449. That's $100 extra dollars for 320MB of RAM and a core that is 30 MHz slower. The comparison is still around a $100 difference when comparing regular editions of both cards with the 320MB stock speed card coming in at $299 versus as low as $359-399 for the 640MB card.
In the final analysis the one thing many will ask is whether to save the extra $100 and get the 320MB version of the 8800GTS over the 640MB version . In spite of much of the hoopla MANY gamers are still running 19" monitors with 1280x1024 resolutions, and at best 1600x1200 20" or 1680x1050 20-22" widescreen LCD's. All of these resolutions show almost no difference between the 320MB and 640MB editions of the GTS cards in our tests. And if you had spent the $500USD to get a 23-26" 1920x1200 monitor or even $1000+ on a 30" 2560x1600 monitor then you probably aren't looking for this class of card. NVIDIA and XFX are quite confident that resolutions up to 1920x1200 will show negligeable differences of performance between both RAM sizes, though personally we'd recommend you consider that 1600x1200 be the resolution limit before you consider the more expensive 640MB version.
XFX seems to be binning its G80 cores and allocating the cream of the crop to their XXX classification. In our GTX XXX review, I didn't overwhelmingly recommend the XXX version over the regular since the differences weren't great enough to justify it. However, in this case I'd suggest getting the XXX version of 320MB over the regular. You'll pay $50 over for a 100MHz RAM and 80MHz core boost. In the case of the core, that's a 16% speed increase. That may not sound like a lot but our test results showed a significant performance boost, and there are plenty of worse ways of wasting $50 on pastes and fans to achieve the same %16 increase in speed. One thing I'd like to test is the XFX GeFORCE 8800 GTS XXX 320MB vs. the XFX GeFORCE 8800 GTS XXX 640MB in some games that are more RAM dependent. However, having only seen and testing the 320MB, my verdict goes with it. It has proved to dominate anything from the previous generation at the $300-$349 price range and is only a slight step behind the GTX XXX. This is definitely an Editor's Choice winner.
