We said it before, the GeForce 8800 series cards are great. They are heavy hitters in the gaming world. They are well built and very quiet. And, even though they've been available for some time, their domination of the high-end market doesn't seem to be challenged. One drawback to the series, at its launch, was the nearly unprecedented price. Now they're affordable. Not cheap, but the price can be justified by the gamer looking for the best. It doesn't hurt that both NVIDIA and ATI have not made mainstream video cards that perform nearly as well as the reigning GeForce 8800 series. On the bench, we've got a Leadtek WinFast PX8800 GTS 640MB video card. - The Tech Lounge

Leadtek WinFast PX8800 GTS 640MB Edition Review

Leadtek kicks off with a deviation from the stock heatsink. Sort of. It looks different, alright, with an aluminum shroud over the exhaust end of the card, and a smaller shroud cooling and concealing the power regulation hardware. But underneath, the heatsink is identical to the stock GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB model. In use, this modified shroud sounds no different, and certainly doesn't hamper the cooling ability of the whole assembly. Everything under the heatsink is normal, too. The core and memory clock speeds are stock, the power regulation bits and memory are all where they're supposed to be.

The stock-ness of the card isn't good or bad, but I wonder why Leadtek went out of their way to make the heatsink look pretty without also deviating from the green PCB? It looks a little out of place. But it does make the card cheaper to make. Let's mention what this card doesn't have, hardware video acceleration. The GeForce 8800 series video cards were made before, it seems, NVIDIA cared to put forth the effort to have good DVD and HD playback. It's pretty good, but nowhere near perfect. Unfortunately, there are no video cards that offer the kind of gaming performance the GTS does, with superior video acceleration.

Leadtek's WinFast PX8800 GTS runs a good performance, that's indisputable. In game play, everything ran superbly and looked great. Yes, the GeForce 8800 GTX leads it in every way, including having a higher price and a greater power requirement. ATI's Radeon HD 2900 XT gets slightly better frames per second without anti-aliasing enabled, but falls behind with. Overclocking this card is, in a word, rewarding. I got the core clock up from 500MHz to 625MHz, and the memory from 1600MHz to 1860MHz. With this boost, it was just shy of matching a GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB graphics card.

Despite all the time NVIDIA has had, neither company makes a mid-range card that really closes the gap between the $150 cards and the $400 ones. These mainstream cards have some advantages, such as better video playback and drastically reduced power consumption, but don't come close to the gaming ability of high-end cards, like this GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB edition. ATI's competing card, the Radeon HD 2900 XT, lacks any low-power advantage, as well as the video playback ability, and performs almost exactly as well as the GeForce 8800 GTS, which doesn't seem to bring much competition all together.

Though there has been no competition, high-end prices have dropped significantly. Buying a GeForce 8800 GTS makes more sense now than it has ever before. It's not showing any age, and those DirectX 10 games are starting to hit the shelves. This card has some advantages over the few other cards in its class, it's about the cheapest GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, and it's a good overclocker. We won't say that this card is the be all end all of the GeForce 8800 GTS's, but it definitely goes on the short list.