PNY nVidia 8800GTX OC Video Card

have a review on an excellent card produced by PNY. PNY knows what gamers are looking for - and even flight simulation fanatics who are hard core followers of Microsoft's Flight Simulator X! For you technical people out there, you can check out the card online at PNY's web site: http://www2.pny.com and click on Consumer Graphic cards. The card we are discussing in this review is the 8800GTX OVERCLOCKED.

You might think that this card could be a bit pricey, but let me tell you - PNY has been around for quite a while and makes very good gear for the PC. Though it may be, I'm sure after reading this review you'll want to do what ever you can to get this card.

This first of all, is the specs from PNY's web site regarding this terrific card:

Specifications - 8800GTX Overclocked
BUS Technology PCI Express
Memory Amount 768MB
Memory Interface 384-bit Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 96 (versus 86.4 standard)
Fill Rate (billion pixels/sec.) 39.7 (versus 36.8 standard)
Stream Processors 128 Shader Clock (MHz) 1458 MHz (versus 1350 MHz standard)
Core Clock (MHz) 621 MHz (versus 575 MHz standard)
Memory Frequency (effective) 2.0 GHz (versus 1.8 GHz standard)

What Comes In The Box:

You get the graphic card, S-video cable, two 6 pin power supply connectors for the graphic card, and a video dongle so that you can connect out to a TV or other type of monitor using multiple connections. There are also two VGA to digital out adapters included for the monitor, since there are no VGA connectors on this card!

What this means is you are dealing with a hefty card, a card that will stand up to the test of the serious flight simmer and gamer. When installing this card for your computer, you must make sure that you have at least a 450W power supply, I had to upgrade mine to a 550W to be able to get it to run, but it was worth every penny.

Installing The Card:

It's done like any other graphic card installation - except this time you must make sure that you have 2 six pin power connectors available on your PC to plug into and run this card for the extra power that it needs. You also need two expansion slots free, one below your PCI-E connector, for this card takes two slots to install. After you install the drivers, you're all set - you are ready for your rock and roll adventure in the virtual skies with Flight Simulator. But are you? There are things here that we have to look at to make sure that it is installed properly. Here's the check list:

Starting up computer: Is your card on your start up screen or if you do not see your card manufacturer for your display, you want to check and make sure it is listed under Display Adaptors in your System Properties. Is it? If so - check. We've completed that part.

Running Flight Simulator for the First Time with the New Card: When I first ran flight simulator for the first time with the new card, I made sure it was listed under the display properties in the sim and wanted to make sure that everything was hunky-dory with my system. It was. Great! But when I loaded up the simulator, there wasn't the performance that I was expecting with such a card. Hmmm....a little disappointed here I thought at first, but let's not get carried away. There's gotta be a reason. Gotta be, gotta be, gotta be. Here's what you have to do: Go into the innards of your Flight Simulator's main folder. Locate the Configuration file. Scroll down to where you see

[DISPLAY.Device.NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX.0]
Mode=1280x768x32
Anisotropic=1

   

After Display Device, it should read the card you have. If not - guess what? Your configuration file was not updated. Delete the configuration file and you will have to start the program again, and then it should be there. Check it. Do you see it? Yes? Great!

You will also want to run any other configuration settings like Mega Scenery X's Scenery updater again to ensure that all is activated with the simulator and also double check that Ultimate Terrain is there as well should you have that also.

Now you know how to properly install the card, I am going to run down the full report of what I've experienced while flying with this wonderful graphics card. This card will be tested under numerous flying conditions, with real world weather - weather themes, maximum traffic and different frames per second targeting rates to see what works best, and then of course the final determination of what makes this card so good.

Well, it's been a good week and a half since I've had the PNY 8800 GTX Overclocked 768mb PCI-E card in my machine. What's my thoughts on such a card? It rules! Everyone who is a serious flight simmer knows the value of having processing power, RAM amount and graphic card - but I feel as though the card is the heart of the matter, which presents Flight Simulator X visuals in such stunning detail.

You know I have been simming since 1999 - when my folks bought me a copy of Flight Simulator 2000 for Christmas, and never did I have the performance in the machine that I have now with FSX. And we all know how much flight simulator has actually improved over the years, from sheets of clouds to three dimensional clouds and now with moving traffic on the roads and different levels of terrain mesh these all have great strain on the power of the processor and card.

I have been testing this card in areas that are usually heavy in air traffic. I have FS Live Traffic X and My Traffic that generates AI traffic for me. I must say that when I flight tested this card, I have used aircraft that I knew before used to generate FPS hits for me, and use processes outside of the computer that used to generate FPS hits as well, for the whole point of testing this card is to make sure that it can and does hold up in real situations for the flight simmer - we want to make sure it performs to our standards, and it does.

   

Now, I'm assuming that when you fly you shut off all your background processes, like virus protection and firewalls - you can do scans after your flight, for you don't need these to be system hogs on your computer. You know that was one of the main first things that they taught us about flight simulator back in the old school days even - to turn those things off that can cause problems in the background.

Before writing this review, I had to make some changes to my scenery settings on this card. Before, when I was flying with Megascenery X, I was flying with full display settings. Megascenery we all know is photographic scenery. Areas that aren't photographic can be a problem, or at least I found out that it can be though I do have a good power machine with my processor and RAM balances. I have a 2.8 GHz dual core and 3 gigs of RAM. Areas such as New York and Washington D.C. - areas that have a lot of autogen - the buildings that are displayed in the simulator, bought my performance down a little bit, though with the maximum amount of RAM on the card - 768mb, the display did drop in FPS, but when I went to Very Dense and Dense on the display settings, and had the FPS slider locked at 21 FPS, the sim runs nice and smooth for me still with the displayed FPS being around 10-12 in high density areas, very few occasions did it drop below 10 and we all know that in flight simulator, 10 can be a breaking point, but we have come to expect it as flight sim fanatics that in certain sceneries and cities that that can and sometimes does happen, but the performance remained nice and smooth so I have to really wonder - should we believe the on screen counter for FPS inside of flight simulator, or not? Because I have read somewhere that even text displayed on the screen can effect the FPS!

   

I have heard that in some cases increasing this setting on the slider for the FPS lock increases performance, but in my case it did the opposite. I have always been above 10 in areas say at high altitude and a lot of cloud layers. The performance doesn't drop for me there, only when taking off and climbing past the autogen is when it might happen to drop a little bit, but like I said, I have not seen any stutters kick in and the simulator still runs nice and smooth. I have found that locking my frames per second at 21 does the job for me.

   

I also must correct myself earlier in saying that I changed my settings - I now have them back on full - I am the type of person who believes in having their cake and eating it too, for when it comes down to flying on the PC, let's face it - you want it as realistic enough and the card is one of the main factors. You can make tweaks to help this card perform even better in the simulator, which I have come across. You can add the following to your command line in the FSX .cfg file: FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.33. You will still need a good card to be able to get good performance in using this tweak, so why not the 8800 GTX Overclocked? What this actually does is help balance how much time the ground textures get. Default setting for simulator purposes is .33 - I have set mine up to .50, and noticed that it does improve texture performance.

Another little trick I also learned to even better performance with a card like this is add this to your configuration:

[BufferPools]
PoolSize=5000000

This line will go in the [BufferPools] section - if it isn't there, you may have to create it. The default pool size is "1000000" but sometimes (if a lot of things are drawing like autogen) that isn't enough. Increasing it to 5 or even 10 million trades off some of your video memory against having to re-allocate these things all the time. The buffer pool is (apparently) the amount of memory used by the system to quickly reintroduce textures. You can scale this setting to your liking. I have mine set at 5000000.

I am also running popular add-ons with my scenery like Ultimate Terrain and FS Genesis Terrain Mesh for Flight Simulator X. These add-ons boost the display quality of mesh and land class for the simulator, and I'm also running Flight Environment X and Active Sky X - all of which can and probably are variants in the FPS increases/decreases, for watch out - when you fly with default real world weather there might be a little hit, but not that much, since it is run with in Flight Simulator X. When you use a weather theme, the FPS really sky rocket - so there's balances in what you need to consider you can use or not use when you fly.

Over all, I'm really impressed with the performance of this card. My Flight Simulator has never been so vivid with detail, smooth performance overall, and it is really impressive with how it handles the popular add-ons, like Megascenery X titles and the Ultimate Terrain Series from Flight 1 Software and Scenery Solutions. It also handles depiction of weather nicely with Flight Environment when used in combination with Active Sky X or default weather downloader. In the end though it does all depend on computer processing power. I have a 2.8 GHz dual core Dell Inspiron 531 that does the job nicely. If you want to hear comments on screen shots when you post them in the forums like "That second one looks real" and "One of these days I'll have to bite the bullet and get that card..." or "I use that scenery and my FSX doesn't look that good..." if you want the ultimate graphic card for gaming, and getting the kudos on screen shot taking - get this card.

       

The verdict? Take out from that savings account, work some over time if you have to, but get the 8800GTX Overclocked card from PNY - if you want the increases in display quality and faster FPS, you won't mind making the sacrifice. I give PNY a 5 out of 5 stars for such a wonderful card. You can visit http://www2.pny.com today and get your very own 8800 GTX Overclocked PCI-E with 768mb of ram. You won't be disappointed, that's for sure! You can go online later this week to see images of the PNY Card and also handsome packaging that comes with such a product.

Screen Shots from Flight Simulator X, Deluxe Edition. These screen shots use the more popular weather engines such as Active Sky X - advanced aircraft, and scenery add-ons such as Mega Scenery X titles and Ultimate Terrain. My traffic is generated from FS Live Traffic and My Traffic, set on 100% for airlines, and 90% for General Aviation.

You can email me if you have any questions regarding the card. Use "Graphic Card Review" in the subject...Thanks!

John Thuot II
Ragtopjohnny01@aol.com

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