PNY GeForce 8800 GTX Review

The 8800 GTS/GTX chip is big. In fact, Nvidia's new GPU weighs in at 681 million transistors, built on a 90nm manufacturing process.



At 100% yield, Nvidia can get 118 dies from a single 300mm wafer (no one ever gets 100% yield.) Even so, 118 dies isn't exactly a large number. Contrast that with a 300mm wafer used to make Intel McKinley Itanium 2 processors. Intel gets 127 maximum dies. McKinley is roughly 474 mm2. This isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, as the McKinley was built on a 180nm process. Still, it's a safe bet that the 8800 GTX die size is well north of 400mm2—which makes it one big chip.

It will be interesting to see the challenges Nvidia and its primary semiconductor partner, TSMC, face as they try to build GPUs. Yield is going to be critical. Even if yields are very high, there will still be relatively few dies per wafer, which means that 8800 boards may be on tight supply.

Befitting such a massive chip, the 8800 GTX board is big. PNY's board is built on the standard Nvidia reference design, and is 10.5 inches long. Contrast this to the just-over-nine inches of the GeForce 7900 GTX and just under 9 inches of ATI/AMD's Radeon X1950 XTX. This is one big board. You need a PC case that's deeper than the typical mid-tower models. We used an Antec P180 case for our testing, and discovered that we had to ensure that the drive bay behind the graphics card was empty before we could install the card.



Note that the GeForce 8800 GTS board is smaller, at 9 inches—just about the same length as the 7900 GTX.

The "extra" SLI connector on top of the 8800 GTX board. This looks similar to the added connecter we saw ATI add to the Radeon X1950 Pro, but it's not clear yet what the future use might be.