Well, NVIDIA have held the GFX performance crown for quite some time with the extremely impressive GeForce 8800 GTX, so when they announced the Ultra a few weeks ago the general consensus was they had yet again pushed the envelope further, albeit with a huge price premium. Everything considered, there will always be a market for these high end cards and with this in mind XFX sent us their new Ultra Extreme edition for review, with further improvements on the core, memory and shader clocks. As AMD's graphics card division are yet unable to supply a real answer to the older GTX, the Ultra is certain to push the two companies high end products even further apart. - DriverHeaven

XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme Video Card Review

The XFX card comes packaged in a menacing looking box, there is the usual XFX mascot, a mean looking dog, and the front of the box gives us a little detail on the specifications. There is also a sticker stating that Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is included as a free game incentive. Whilst the front could probably do with a little more product info we can't fault XFX as the sides and rear of the packaging make up for this. One other point worthy of noting is the level of protection XFX give their products. First up we have the outer box and thicker inner box.

The card itself is very imposing. As soon as we opened the anti static bag we were impressed by the design with the jet black cooler covering the whole surface of the PCB. Because of this the card feels bigger than the GTX however it is exactly the same length with only the edges of the cooler varying in size between models. Underneath the cooler we have a G80 core on a reference PCB and memory design. Despite the reference layout the graphics cards detailed specifications are anything but reference. The core is running at 650MHz, this is 75MHz more than the GTX's reference 575MHz.

The memory clock on the Extreme is an incredible 2260MHz, around 460MHz faster than the stock GTX. As with the GTX, the Ultra uses a 384-bit memory bus and GDDR3 memory. The memory chips used on this model are Samsung 0.8ns and rated at 2500MHz. Finally we have an increase in the shader clock from 1350MHz on the GTX to 1620MHz on the Ultra Extreme edition. Overall that's some decent increases over the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra reference specification and the shader clock increase alone should help the Extreme edition surpass the older part by a considerable margin.

Overclocking of the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra was performed in ATITool, we first used the tool to automatically set the max memory and core then manually tested and adjusted as required. The final clocks we settled on were 690MHz core and 2312MHz memory. The card did work at 710MHz core and 2372MHz memory however there were stability issues and on occasion, visual artifacts. Even with a relatively small increase in core and memory speeds the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra creates a decent performance gap over the scores at stock speeds.

The card itself is well engineered and is what we have come to expect from XFX, special praise should be given to the cooler which not only looks wonderful but is quiet and is capable of handling the incredible clock speeds, while still allowing some room for further overclocking. It is nice to see a company releasing a high end graphics card so understated and aesthetically appealing, rather than slapping LED's and stickers everywhere. It is the mindblowing performance of the product which takes it to another level and the decision by XFX to enhance the clocks has resulted in class leading gaming performance.

What can we say about the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme that the results in our benchmarks don't? There really isn't anything. The Extreme edition is the fastest card we have seen to date and the enhanced clocks make the purchase of an Ultra over a GTX worthwhile for the first time. Whether blasting through the latest games or delving into a high definition movie the XFX card provides a sublime visual experience with industry leading performance. Sure it is expensive, but this card is one of the highest quality products. If you want the highest performing video card on the market, then look no further.