Foxconn FV-N88SMCD2-ONOC GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB video card review

No matter how loud, long and hard we've sung the praises of NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 architecture, citing both its performance and feature set as very much praise-worthy, our single real sideswipe at G80-based boards have been with regard to price.  The flagship GeForce 8800 GTX in particular is out of the reach of many, while thankfully the GeForce 8800 GTS's cost has slipped somewhat in recent weeks.

We clearly weren't the only ones concerned with the largely prohibitive costs of the GeForce 8800 range, as it seems to have been playing on NVIDIA's minds too.  Thus, last week saw the release of a slightly cheaper GTS-based part, which keeps the full complement of Stream Processors and clock speeds as the board seen at launch while seeing its frame buffer halved - From 640MB in the original GTS, down to 320MB in this new model.

So, we now have ourselves a cheaper GeForce 8800 GTS board, but with half the amount of on-board memory to play with.  Just how much impact will this loss of RAM have on gaming performance?  Our task today is to find out.

To do this, we've grabbed Foxconn's latest offering, the nonsensically named FV-N88SMCD2-ONOC.  This follows the clock speed and broad specifications of the FV-N88SMBD2-ONOC we looked at a few weeks ago to the letter, but with just 320MB instead of the 640MB seen on that factory overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS part.  I'll forgive (just this once!) if you haven't kept up with Foxconn's product naming to the letter, so read on to learn everything you need to know about this board, as well as the difference between 320MB and 640MB of frame buffer sat on your graphics board in real-world gaming.