Dated, but still a good option! (BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC)

Member Name: Byren

Product:	BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC
Date:	06/07/09 (27 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, can still handle most games at their highest settings

Disadvantages: It will soon really start to feel the test of time

The 8800 GTS is a now a fairly dated graphics card, it was released by Nvidia back in 2007.

Back in 2007 I decided to build my own PC - as I like to play games and use 3d modelling programs It needed to be powerful and have a lot of graphical processing power under its hood.

After a lot of research in to graphics cards I realised that the choice would end up being from either ATI or Nvidia. I chose this card. There was no technical reason why I chose Nvidia over Radeon, but unlike ATI cards, I did understand the GeForce naming conventions.
Basically, the different cards are sorted in to 3 categories and the letters after the number signify which catergory that card belongs to. Below are the suffixes that belong to each one...

Mainstream - SE, LE, GS, GT
Performance - LE, GS, GSO, GT, GTS
Enthusiast - GS, GT, GTS, GTO, GTX, Ultra, GX2

So the 8800 GTS falls into the performance category. Being that this catergory isn't the "best" means it's also not extortionately priced.

I find that cards in the performance range of cards are the most reasonably priced for what they offer, and they can really hack some of the high-end graphical processes.
I bought my 8800 over two years ago now and it can still handle most of the current-gen games with their settings set to max. Occasionally I'll get some lag, but I'm unsure if that's the card or my, also now dated, duel core processors.
I tested out Crysis, a good game to benchmark graphics cards with, in order to see what the 8800's limitations were. Unfortunately it couldn't manage the highest settings, but the game still looked great and ran smoothly on the lower settings.

Looking at the card you'll notice how big it is. This thing takes up two slots at the back of the PC, one of the slots being a dedicated fan exhaust for the 8800 to keep it nice and cool while it works hard inside your case.

So, almost two and a half years in to owning this card and I can still say that I'm happy with it, It hasn't really faultered and has allowed me to keep on top of graphical updates.

Unfortunately I don't think this card will be able to stay on top of the latest games for much longer. I fear that with the coming of DirectX 11 and the games that will come with it, this card will struggle to render the highest settings as it has done for the current generation of graphics.

That said, this card still has a couple of years left in it and should be able to render most things that are thrown at it, just maybe not at their highest settings ;)

Summary: Worth a buy if you're not too bothered about future-proofing your PC

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Installation:
Installation:
3D-rendering:
Precision: