The time for affordable DirectX 10 boards is approaching sooner than most people expected. In a run-up to the launch of AMD's Radeon X2800 and GeForce 8600 series, NVIDIA has prepared a bridge between upcoming mainstream GeForce 8600 for $199 and high-end GeForce 8800 GTS cards for $449. The bridge's name is the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB. Graphzilla just slapped ten 32MB chips instead of current 64MB ones and cut the price by $150 dollars to an affordable $299. The card doesn't otherwise change, we're still talking about a G80 working at 500MHz with 96 scalar shaders clocked at 1.2GHz. Memory clock also remained the same, 1.6GHz effective yields 64GB/s of bandwidth. - The Inquirer

Cheaper GeForce 8800 GTS ready to market shortly

Given the fact that nothing else has changed, you can now calculate the price of components on GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card, 640MB of fastest GDDR3 memory make out for about 55% of a price of the card, PCB also isn't cheap, cooling solution costs 10% and the GPU makes only 20% of the price. And the G80 graphics chip is the most advanced piece in the micro processing industry. Its complexity makes the Athlon 64, Core 2 or even Sony's Cell look like little kids in a kindergarten. And performance, well that should be on par with the 640MB version since being clocked similarly.