Leadtek WinFast GeForce PX8800GT 256MB
This card is the same to the NVIDIA reference except for the Leadtek customized sticker which covers the heatsink. With a PCB with length around 23 centimeters, its design has 8 layers with a 256-bit memory bus. The 256-bit memory bus may scare at first, comparing to 320-bit and 384-bit off respectively 8800GTS and 8800GTX cards, but NVIDIA thought about it and clocked the memories modules at high speeds 900Mhz (1.8Ghz) providing as much as 57 GB/sec bandwidth.
Thankfully this is a single-slot video card, making use of three heat pipes that transfer the heat flow from the copper that contacts with the GPU die to the heatsink. The GeForce 8800 cooler’s sole is made from copper whereas the rest of the base is aluminum.
This video card requires only one auxiliary power connector located at the rear of the board, thanks to lower power 65nm GPU. When using a single video card configuration, is recommended use of at least 400W PSU.
The GeForce 8800 GT supports dual-link HDCP and the latest PureVideo HD 2nd generation video processor, which can be also found on 8600 series while none of others 8800 series cards supports it.
The sticker over the fan states 256MB of memory and it’s the only visual differences between the 256MB and 512MB variants.
Most likely all SLI NVIDIA boards, this one also carry the SLI connector in its standard location along the top edge. Making use of SLI on a good performance card yet slim and quiet like this one seem to be pretty good option.
As we can see on specs, the transistors went from 681 million of the GeForce 8800 GTX/GTS series to about 754 million transistors on 8800GT. This is because NVIDIA incorporated the video processing engine, dubbed VP2 on 8800GT die alongside some more enhancements, the use of 65nm fab process was essential to achieve all of this.
The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 is the world’s first consumer GPU to support PCI Express 2.0, this mean that the bandwidth for each direction (upstream and downstream) doubled from 4GB/sec to 8GB/sec making it capable of total 16GB/sec bandwidth but can already expect to see the PCIe 3.0 doubling again the bandwidth from the current 2.0 version. These PCIe transitions won’t affect badly the consumer in anyway due to total backward compatibility from 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0.
