Although the new ATI R600 graphics processor failed to take the leadership away from NVIDIA, the latter still decided to strengthen their positions in the high performance segment even more having introduced GeForce 8800 Ultra. How fast is this solution and what are its advantages over the GeForce 8800 GTX? It was known even before the official announcement that the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra, a premium class graphics card solution, would be an overclocked version of GeForce 8800 GTX video card. So, the GeForce 8800 Ultra was supposed to come with the same GPU as its predecessor and the only arguable things were the frequencies and the installation of fast GDDR4 memory. - X-Bit Labs

XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB Extreme Card Review

Some people named core frequencies of 650-700MHz and a memory frequency of 2000MHz and higher and a price of $999, but what do we have in the end? The GeForce 8800 Ultra uses a total of 768MB of GDDR3 memory, the same memory amount as is installed on the GeForce 8800 GTX. The GPU frequency is only 612MHz for the main domain and 1500MHz for the shader processor domain. The memory frequency has increased from 1800MHz to 2160MHz, the biggest frequency growth of the new card. In fact, the GeForce 8800 Ultra was supposed to be a preemptive strike on AMD.

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is a bit of a disappointment, actually. People had hoped for something more, especially as many of NVIDIA's partners had long been offering pre-overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX with parameters very similar to the new card's. NVIDIA did not introduce anything new. It just rolled out a luxurious product priced at $829 and targeted at a lean group of enthusiasts that strive to have maximum possible performance regardless of the price. Anyway, the GeForce 8800 Ultra is undoubtedly the fastest gaming graphics card today and deserves our interest for this fact alone.

The GeForce 8800 Ultra seems to differ greatly from its precursor GeForce 8800 GTX, but it is only an outward appearance created by the modernized cooling system whose casing covers the entire card and makes it look massive. Actually, the card uses the same PCB design as the GeForce 8800 GTX. This is reasonable on the NVIDIA part since developing a new PCB or modifying the old one would have required large money and time expenditures. Considering that the GeForce 8800 Ultra is based on a new-revision G80 chip with somewhat reduced power consumption, the use of the PCB from the GTX is justifiable.

All in all, GeForce 8800 Ultra could be a disappointment for an end-user, because it doesn't boast any significant advantages over the GeForce 8800 GTX except for a few individual cases, but costs considerably more. Nevertheless, the solution is still the today's fastest single card gaming solution, so NVIDIA did successfully strengthen its positions as the manufacturer of world's fastest gaming accelerator. They have also demonstrated that their technical potential is sufficient to raise the frequency of such complicated chip as G80 without pushing its power consumption beyond acceptable limits.

As for XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme, this is undoubtedly a high-end product for those who need to get maximum gaming performance at any price, despite the cost of solutions like that. Thanks to higher clock speeds, this card is slightly faster than the standard GeForce 8800 Ultra in gaming tests, but this performance advantage is practically the same as that of GeForce 8800 Ultra over the GeForce 8800 GTX counterpart, or maybe even smaller than that. In any case, if you are one of computer gaming enthusiasts and you care about the performance, then XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme is certainly your best choice.