NVIDIA has never been shy about slicing and dicing its product line-up to meet the needs of specific groups of the graphics card buying public with the result that you can buy its flagship DirectX 10 GeForce 8800 chip in a number of versions. The bread and butter version is the GeForce 8800 GTS with 640MB of memory and priced at $380, though there's a cheaper, bread and dripping variant with a mere 320MB of memory for $320. Move up the scale and you'll find the caviaron toast GeForce 8800 GTX with 768MB of memory that uses faster clock speeds and a larger complement of NVIDIA's unified stream processors to deliver top notch performance for a hefty $600. - RegHardware

ASUS Extreme N8800 Ultra 768MB Graphics Review

Since its launch in November last year the GeForce 8800 GTX has been the fastest graphics card on the market, period. That's a considerable achievement when you consider the GeForce 8800 GTX is a DirectX 10 part that has been tested exclusively in a DirectX 9.0c environment for the simple reason that we don't yet have any DirectX 10 games. It's just as well because NVIDIA hadn't quite sorted out its Windows Vista drivers when it launched the new chip, but happily that sorry situation is behind us. It's May 2007 now and we still don't have any DirectX 10 games, although some first demos are getting released.

So what, you may wonder, do you get for an extra $200 over the price of a regular GeForce 8800 GTX? The core speed is raised from 575MHz to 612MHz, the stream processors run at 1500MHz instead of 1350MHz, and the memory has an effective speed of 2160MHz rather than 1800MHz. In other words, the Ultra is a carefully selected GTX that runs approximately ten per cent faster than normal. The other thing that sets the Ultra apart is the layout of the heatsink package. The GTS and GTX use a conventional double slot design that transfers heat from the heatsink to the heat exchanger via an array of heatpipes.

We have to ask ourselves why NVIDIA launched the Ultra when it already ruled the roost with the GeForce 8800 GTX. The obvious answer is that it had to prepare for the launch of the Radeon HD X2900 XT. However, the performance of the Radeon HD 2900 XT fell a long way short of the GeForce 8800 GTX, so there was arguably no need for the Ultra after all. The GeForce 8800 Ultra takes over from the GTX as the fastest graphics card on the market but the price is truly terrifying.