First post, by Retroinside
- Rank
- Newbie
I’ve been experimenting a bit with my MSI P35 Platinum and a Q6600, and I wanted to share a quick comparison between two cards from roughly the same era:
- ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro 1024MB GDDR4 🟥
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB (G92) 🟩
As far as I remember, the HD 2900 Pro shipped with lower clocks in order to reduce power consumption, temperatures, and to somehow “fix” what had been considered a half-failure with the 2900 XT.
On the other side, the 8800 GTS 512MB introduced the G92 GPU (a die-shrink of the G80), which combined some features of the older GTS and GTX, but with improved efficiency and higher clocks thanks to the smaller process.
In my tests, I pushed the Q6600 B3 to 3.6 GHz using a 1600 MHz FSB ⚡, which isn’t bad for air cooling, paired with 2GB Geil DDR2 800 CL4-4-4-12 .
In real-world performance the two cards aren’t worlds apart — the 8800 GTS often held its ground surprisingly well 👍.
Still, the HD 2900 was terrifyingly ahead when it came to memory 💥, not only because of its massive 512-bit bus paired with GDDR4, but also because it shipped with twice the VRAM (1GB vs 512MB).
This was just a short test in 3D Mark 2003, with a couple of dusty cards I had lying around 🧹, but I thought it would be fun to share what they could do when pushed to their maximum (at least in my case) overclock.
Both cards easily break 750 MHz on the core, but neither can hold 800 MHz without voltage tweaks ⚠️.
On the memory side, the HD 2900 simply crushes the GTS thanks to its 512-bit memory bus and extra VRAM, effectively doubling the available bandwidth 🚀.
Screenshots are attached — enjoy! 📸
Of course, this is not meant to be a full or exhaustive benchmark session — rather, just a quick test with the hardware I had on hand 🖥️.
