Power and System Setup

Overclocking Akimbo

Bear in mind that standard GeForce 8800 GT cards are supposed to be clocked at 600 MHz core and 900 MHz memory. EVGA’s single-slot 8800 GT Superclocked Edition ups those numbers to 650 and 950, respectively. Then, the 8800 GT Akimbo lumbers in running 720 MHz and 1000 MHz clocks. So, out of the gate, this is already a significantly overclocked video card.

Nevertheless, we installed NVIDIA’s nTune application and started playing with the clocks in a bid for even more speed. After independently tweaking the core and then tweaking the memory, we eventually settled on a 775 MHz core and 1010 MHz memory configuration. We didn’t encounter any stability issues at those speeds, whereas even slightly higher settings would cause graphics corruption.

For more on overclocked performance, check out our benchmark results. We’ve added the tweaked settings to each chart so you can see how the beefed up Akimbo compares to the even more beefed up Akimbo card.

Power Consumption

As mentioned, NVIDIA says its 8800 GT maxes out around 105W of power consumption. To get a better idea of how the Akimbo card compares to a lower-clocked 8800 GT board (and AMD’s current top offerings), we fired up the good ol’ Extech power analyzer and ran idle and load numbers.

System Setup

Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 (3.16 GHz)

ASUS Striker II Formula (780i SLI)

2GB OCZ Technology DDR2-1066 CAS5 Memory (2x1GB) EPP 1.0

EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT Akimbo Edition
EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT Superclocked Edition
AMD Radeon HD 3870 512MB
AMD Radeon HD 3850 256MB
ForceWare 169

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB SATA 3 Gbps Hard Drive

Windows Vista x32 Service Pack 1, current as of April 12th, 2008 with Windows Update

DirectX 10

Desktop resolution 1600x1200, 32-bit color, 85Hz refresh

We disable Vista’s UAC and generate an image using Norton Ghost 11 to create the same basic benchmark platform for each test bed. The image is frozen with the latest Windows Updates and deployed to each system. The appropriate drivers are then loaded to the machines.

Benchmarks

3DMark06
Unreal Tournament III
Crysis
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
Company of Heroes
Call of Duty 4