For those that don't know, the performance graphics card market is dominated by two rivals; ATI and NVIDIA. These two companies constantly play the game of one upmanship with each other and recently it has been no different. As ATI released, after much delay their Radeon HD 2900 series of cards, NVIDIA brought to the market a hugely overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX card, known as the Ultra. This card promised monster performance that would keep NVIDIA as the performance king for that bit longer. Today we have the SuperClocked version of this card from EVGA and we will share with you all the looks and feel of this performance monster. - XSReviews

EVGA GeForce 8800 Ultra SuperClocked Card Review

We are afraid to say there is nothing markedly different with the GeForce 8800 Ultra when compared to the bog standard GTX released around 6 months ago. It is however faster in core clock speed, memory clock speed and the shader clocks. This should equate for a nice performance increase over the standard GTX, lets just hope the price hike is worth it. The box for the e-GeForce 8800 Ultra SuperClocked is very sexy indeed. It doesn't have the typical half naked robot woman draped across it which in this case is a good thing, as its color scheme and layout make it look very sophisticated and professional.

The GeForce 8800 Ultra card itself is huge in every way. It's as long as a normal GTX but the cooler has a massive shroud that makes this card over an inch thick. The cooler on the Ultra is pretty much the same as the normal GTX cooler but is slightly extended to draw air over the PWM area. This helps the Ultra reach the frequencies that it can as the PWM area can get surprisingly hot and once it hits a certain temperature can cause instability. The back of the Ultra is peppered with screws to hold the monstrous cooler on. This should allow for plenty of customisation with aftermarket coolers should they be made.

The Ultra is surprisingly quiet. Well I don't know about silent, but compared to many high-end cards out there it does stay nicely quiet. However this does come at a bit of a price as this card runs pretty darn hot. This is partly down to the huge clocks this GPU is running, but also the relatively slow spinning fan. The Ultra SuperClocked has awesome performance, but it really isn't that much more powerful than a standard GTX. If you want the absolute best performance you can buy right now then go for this bad boy but if you are content on being a very close second then a standard GTX is probably your best bet.