No doubt that it will be close to 6 months soon that NNVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX graphics adapter retains the title of the world's fastest solution. However its price of $599 will hardly let it become really popular. But these days the GeForce 8 family has already welcomed its new members, the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB and 320MB, which are significantly less expensive, going at $449 and $299 respectively. Flagship graphics cards from the top price category are known to be the public demonstration of the developer's technological achievements. Such solutions are deservedly popular among wealthy gamers but they never make up a substantial share in the general sales picture. - X-Bit Labs

MSI GeForce 8800 GTS OverClocked Edition Review

So, this is how the GeForce 8800 GTS was built. This graphics card differs greatly from its elder brother when it comes to technical characteristics. It has lower frequencies and a few disabled streamed processors. It also has less graphics memory, a narrower memory bus, and a few inactive TMU's and ROP's. The GeForce 8800 GTS features 6 groups of streamed processors, 16 ALU's in each, for a total of 96 ALU's. The GeForce 8800 GTS seems to be weaker than the Radeon X1950 XTX in pure computing power, but there are some factors to be accounted for. The main advantage are the higher clocked stream processors.

The less expensive GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB was announced only in February. It is expected to replace the GeForce 7950 GT in the performance mainstream class and differs from the regular GeForce 8800 GTS in the amount of graphics memory only. In fact, NVIDIA created this card by simply replacing the latter's 512MB memory chips with 256MB ones. This solution helped NVIDIA establish its technical superiority in the popular $299 category. We'll see shortly how the reduced memory amount affects the card's performance and if it makes sense to pay extra $150 for the 640MB model.

The senior model with an official price of $449 has been good in terms of performance. The GeForce 8800 GTS outperformed the AMD Radeon X1950 XTX in most of our benchmarks. There are only a few applications in which it provides the same performance as the AMD card and is slower than the GeForce 7950 GX2. Considering the highest performance provided by the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, we would not compare it directly with the last generation products because the latter do not support DirectX 10. Moreover, the GeForce 7950 GX2 offer a lower quality of anisotropic filtering.

The MSI GeForce 8800 GTS OC edition is a product with good accessories bundle which difference from NVIDIA's reference card goes beyond the box design, accessories and the sticker on its cooler. This graphics card is pre-overclocked by the manufacturer and ensures a considerable performance boost over the reference GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB in most games. Of course, it cannot match the GeForce 8800 GTX, but it's not bad to have some extra frames per second. These cards seem to be carefully selected to ensure their ability to function at increased frequencies because our sample did quite well during overclocking.