Some time ago NVIDIA sealed their place as the current king of the graphics card market when they released the GeForce 8800 Ultra. Let's first of all take a top of the line GPU, meaning the G80 chipset from NVIDIA which was previously powering the GeForce 8800 GTX accelerator. Next add some spice in the form of one of NVIDIA's top partners, and by that we main Gainward. What we have is a recipe for something nice, or so we hope. We take Gainward's version of the GeForce 8800 Ultra for a spin, rack up some the benchmark scores and have a ball with some pretty tight games. We take a look at Gainward's take on this Ultra speed demon... - Overclock3D

Gainward BLISS 8800 Ultra 768MB Video Card Review

In their recent style Gainward have used their usual female rendered character on the box. The packaging is pretty attractive although we would not be sure how much it would stand out on shelves next to the likes of BFG and XFX. The inside of the box protects the card very well as is usual with Gainward's excellent packaging system. The Gainward BLISS 8800 Ultra follows the stock NVIDIA design for the Ultra with a black plastic cooler shielding the cooling system below it. The cooling system is interesting in that the fan actually extends beyond the top level of the cooler, and is not flush with the cooler.

After opening up the card and taking a look at the cooler we are not sure exactly why they went with this way as it doesn't seem to particularly affect the cooling properties of the cooler that we could see. Having just said that, the cooler on the GeForce 8800 Ultra is quite a lot cooler than that of the GTX. It also does not allow as much branding as the cooler on the GTX which means the only thing telling you this is a Gainward card is the G-sign emblazoned on the middle of the fan. Again the same as on the GTX is the chip itself, which protected pretty well from being crushed by the cooler.

The GeForce 8800 Ultra is a top of the line, top dollar graphics card and you get what you pay for. If you want blistering performance and bleeding edge graphics and have the screen resolution to take advantage of that then the GeForce 8800 Ultra is your card. At $700 the GeForce 8800 Ultra isn't priced too badly, although a GeForce 8800 GTX can set you back $120 less. It's basically a matter of deciding if your budget can afford the faster clocked card or not. The GeForce 8800 Ultra is a card that takes the top end and really takes it further, something NVIDIA didn't actually have to do.