We've often wondered what the point of owning a supercar is if you live in a city like London, to have spent all that money and have all that power at your fingertips and not be able to utilise it must be very frustrating. But maybe, along with the status involved, the knowledge of what it is capable of and the occasional instance where you do get to fully unleash the power stored up in that beast makes it all worthwhile. NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX chipset falls into the much the same sort of bracket, at least for now. It's very, very expensive and for the most part you'll barely tap the potential stored inside this graphics monster, but when you do you'll know exactly where all that money went. - The Inquirer

ECS GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB HDCP Compliant Review

In this particular instance we're checking the ECS GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB graphics card, the flagship GeForce 8800 chipset card from Elitegroup Computer Systems and according to our tests it performs superbly well, even when compared to the other GeForce 8800 GTX cards out there. Everything about this card is somewhat over the top, bordering on the ludicrous Texan philosophy that bigger is automatically better. The box is gigantic, the card is absurdly long and the cooler is similarly large. Quite some power is needed, but 600W power supply ran the card without a hitch.

To get technical for a second the GTX version sports 768MB GDDR3 memory that interfaces with the GPU on a 384-bit memory bus, with an operating core set at 575MHz and memory clock timings of 1.8GHz. The installation of the ECS GeForce 8800 GTX was fairly straightforward except that, even though the case we stuck it into was pretty spacious, it took a little manoeuvring to get into place and get hooked up with enough power. If you're thinking about setting up two fo these in SLI then we advise thinking vary carefully about the case you put them in. It requires quite a spacial case.

The ECS GeForce 8800 GTX is certainly an impressive graphics card, it's got power in spades and the performance is remarkable. Unfortunately we didn't really find anything that separates it from the competition and the fact that it feels underutilised means that we're reluctant to recommend it to anyone unless you absolutely have to get a new graphics card right now and you have the money to burn. With a few other variations on this chipset due out soon and ATI's R600 chipset on the horizon we would recommend holding out until there is more choice and the prices have come down a bit.