To the surprise of many, NVIDIA announced the GeForce 8800 Ultra at the start of this month, after already holding the graphics performance crown for seven months with thanks going to the company's simply excellent GeForce 8800 GTX. The formula was simple, you take the fastest graphics card in the world and give it some go faster stripes. The result is not surprisingly a new fastest graphics card in the world. Performance wasn't the problem with the launch though; the problem was value for money, or perceived value for money, to better describe. The card was so much more expensive than both the standard and pre-overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX's, yet it wasn't all that impressive. - Bit-Tech

EVGA e-GeForce 8800 Ultra SuperClock Card Review

Over the past few weeks, we have been playing with a couple of retail GeForce 8800 Ultra cards, the first of which was EVGA's e-GeForce 8800 Ultra SuperClocked edition. For this card, EVGA has applied the same logic that it normally does when it attempts to differentiate itself from the volatile graphics card market, it has taken NVIDIA's reference clocks and literally thrown them out of the window. The core has been pushed from 612MHz up to 655MHz, while the shader clock has gone from 1500MHz to 1660MHz. Finally, the memory has been pushed up to 2250MHz, about 90MHz higher than the reference frequency.

What EVGA hasn't done though, is moved away from the reference cooling design. That's not to say the cooling solution is bad, we actually love the way it looks, and it also works pretty well too! Although the reference design's sleek look was superb, EVGA has ruined it with a sticker along the top of the card which, to be fair, is EVGA's attempt to brand the card as its own. The problem is not really the sticker though, it's the choice of material used for the plastic shroud on the cooler, it's just not got the right finish for sticking stickers to. Since the shroud has a textured finish, the sticker doesn't blend into its design.

After a few hours of tweaking, we managed to get EVGA's e-GeForce 8800 Ultra SuperClocked running without heat problems or artifacting at 682MHz core and 2398MHz on the memory. EVGA's e-GeForce 8800 Ultra SuperClocked is quite simply the fastest graphics card we have ever checked in our labs. It delivered some blistering frame rates in all of the games we tested, and for the most part it has enough performance on tap to feed your gaming needs for high definition gaming. Of course, this may change in th every near future with the arrival of more stressful DirectX 10 titles.

Getting back to EVGA's card and bundle, we think that it's a good product, but it's priced out of the grasp of most early adopters. It just doesn't offer enough value for money over EVGA's e-GeForce 8800 GTX SuperClocked card, which is over $175 cheaper. This isn't uncommon for products based on NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 Ultra GPU though, because the initial cards clocked at reference speeds were priced well out of the market too. At least the price has come down a little bit, but we can't help but feel it needs to come down further still. The reference clocked GeForce 8800 Ultra's start at around $850 now.

As for EVGA's heavily overclocked GeForce 8800 Ultra that we've looked at, we think that it needs to come down below $900 before it's going to be an attractive proposition. The current pricing structure just places it in the bracket for those with more money than sense. A shame, because that's about the only thing wrong with this product.