So you read the reviews on the brand new reference NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics card the other day, and you thought well the GeForce Ultra is not that Ultra at all? It is currently without a doubt at the top of the graphics card leader board at the moment, king of the hill by a long way but the former crown holder GeForce 8800 GTX was already doing pretty well, anyway. The tweaked out G80 GPU is NVIDIA's preemptive strike to whatever AMD might come out with later this month in their new R600 range. Let's find out if the Ultra can be truly and fully Ultra with the help of XFX and all the overclockers that work at the company who want to give us nothing but performance. - TweakTown

XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB XXX Edition Review

That is right, we are talking about retail GeForce 8800 Ultra, the type you actually buy in the shop. This is not just any ordinary GeForce 8800 Ultra though, it is an XXX edition and trust us, by the time we finished with it, we thought that it deserved that XXX stamp well and truly. There is not much point going into too much detail on the GPU itself as it's really just a GeForce 8800 GTX on steroids with no other changes, it is just a refresher product. Well, NVIDIA claims a newer revision chip is used which is the reason for being able to pump out the higher clock speeds, nevertheless, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is here.

Straight away we have an awesome looking box from XFX, they have moved away from the white background to the black here and it gives it a bit more evil and sinister look. It really suits it overall. It is the black sheep of the family, alright! At first glance, it oozes with style and is just shouting out monster performance with its sleek black appearance. Considering the price, it should damn well almost smile politely back at you too. Length wise the PCB is exactly the same as the GTX, the only difference with the dimensions is that it sits slightly higher due to the cooler that covers the entire front side of the card.

Volume levels of the card are actually really good, while the setup of the card is different to that of the previous GeForce 8800 GTX king, it uses the same kind of fan, which is quiet and does a pretty good job at keeping the card cool. The standard GeForce 8800 GTX comes clocked in with a 575/1800MHz and a shader at 1350MHz clock speed. The Ultra comes along and improves upon that offering at stock 612/2160MHz, and a shader clock of 1500MHz. Given that XFX already has the GeForce 8800 GTX overclocked cards which cost less than the Ultra, it's debatable if there will even be any tangible performance increases.

Luckily XFX improve upon this with their high-end GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX model which comes clocked at 675/2300MHz, with a shader set 1675MHz, quite an increase across the board and a big jump over the fastest GTX cards on the market. We're getting more bandwidth again which should give us a clear lead over the GeForce 8800 GTX as well as the reference Ultra cards that we saw in other articles a few days ago. You cannot say that the new GeForce 8800 Ultra is not a true performer let alone when you pair it up with the XFX brand and their factory overclocked XXX edition but this is coming at such a huge cost.

The card is nothing more than a way of sticking it to AMD and ATI, in regards to their upcoming R600 launch later this month. Much like Intel seem to be trying their very hardest to destroy AMD, NVIDIA is also giving it their best shot, too. XFX's GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX screams along at top speed leaving every other single GPU solution in the dust, there is no doubt about that. However it is safe to say that with word on the street that supply and quantities is very low, NVIDIA is not expecting to sell many of these graphics cards.

We have even heard from some of NVIDIA's partners in Taiwan that they do not even want to touch the tweaked G80 chip in fear that they will not sell. NVIDIA believes there will be a few handfuls of ultra high-end extreme users out there that will pay the money just to have the best of the best. Bottom line...absolutely monster killer performance but with a price tag that could make you faint!