EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS SSC 640MB Review

At the conclusion of our GeForce 8800 GT Performance Preview, we openly wondered why NVIDIA would continue to offer the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB in their product lineup: the GeForce 8800 GT consistently outperformed the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB in our benchmarks, all while residing in a single-slot package and officially carrying an MSRP that was $100 lower to boot. In our opinion, there was just no good reason for the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB to continue to exist. Outside of a few very demanding situations, the 8800 GT was the faster card and simply outclassed the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB.

Other media outlets came to the same conclusion we did on the GeForce 8800 GT and the public overwhelmingly felt the same way as well: the GeForce 8800 GT sold out at all retail outlets online within hours of the GPU’s release. To this day GeForce 8800 GT cards are still very difficult to find in stock; as soon as a shipment of cards arrives it sells out almost instantly.

With the instant popularity of the GeForce 8800 GT, the question remains – why continue to offer the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB at all?


It turns out that NVIDIA and their board partners had one additional trick up their sleeve for the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB. Rather than sticking with the original GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB specifications, which call for 96 stream processors running at 1.2GHz and a 500MHz graphics core, a second, more powerful GPU has been concocted that equips newer GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB cards with 112 stream processors – just like the GeForce 8800 GT.


These newer generation GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB cards also ship with higher speeds than the original 8800 GTS. Both BFG and EVGA have announced cards built around this enhanced 8800 GTS GPU and they’re both clocked at speeds considerably higher than the original GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB specifications called for. The EVGA card is clocked significantly faster than the BFG board though, sporting 1.35GHz stream processors versus 1.2GHz on the BFG, as well as 1.8GHz memory (the memory on the BFG card is clocked at just 1.7GHz), so we were eager to see how it performed. If you want the fastest GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB card in the world, EVGA’s e-GeForce 8800 GTS SSC is the obvious choice. Let’s take a closer look at the card…