XFX is a global presence in the world of electronic gaming. With its focus on taking gaming to the extreme, XFX has developed an exciting array of video cards and accessories that are designed to maximize the entire entertainment experience. Well in fact, at the end of last year XFX released a GeForce 7600 GT with Fatal1ty partnership, the card not only stunned visually, it also delivered excellent performance suiting the high demands of true hardcore gamers on a budget. This year XFX returns with yet another Fatal1ty graphics accelerating product, the GeForce 8800 GTS Fatal1ty. Having a déjà vu? Well, you might expect so with the Fatal1ty series... - Madshrimps

XFX GeForce 8800 GTS Fatal1ty Video Board Review

The GeForce 8800 GTS Fatal1ty comes in the traditional black and red colors with the face of Jonathan Wendel all over it. Ordinary package content, still one of the most positive additions here is the top selling PC game Lost Planet which you get absolutely for free, not every vendor offers such extra's with their GeForce 8800 GTS cards. The door sign didn't really draw my attention, although some might find this a cool gadget. The card itself look like any another GeForce 8800 GTS, meaning XFX is using NVIDIA's reference PCB design and also reference cooling with custom red sticker with the XFX Fatal1ty logo.

Like we told, every GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB is NVIDIA factory made, the final video card clocks and heatsink labels is the only thing which each manufacturer has different, with the exception of Calibre that is. The voltage levels of the GPU and memory chips didn't change either, how could XFX possible sell few thousand GeForce 8800 GTS video cards clocked that high knowing that in previous articles we found it very hard to get even near those clock settings with several different samples? The answer lies in the GPU itself, somewhere around this summer NVIDIA took their G80 to a new revision, the A3 stepping.

 This new GPU revision seems to clock noticeable better then the old A2 revision, average GPU core overclocks to 700MHz were no longer pure luck and this also seem to have brought XFX to the thoughts to release a monstrous clocked GeForce 8800 GTS. The GPU core clock gets a 136MHz clock boost while the shader clock is upgraded with another 432MHz. But there is more, the video memory chips also have been changed, as we now found Samsung 1.2ns GDDR3 memory chips mounted on the board. These Samsung chips allow a much higher clock and XFX bumps these up with 414MHz.

XFX's Fatal1ty series are build by and for gamers, sleek looks and steady performance in one package? Overall XFX smoothed out the game play, boosting the average frames per second which is highly demanded for the hardcore gamers. The minimum frame rate will be boosted also most of the time as long as the 320MB video memory doesn't become the bottleneck. Overclocking wise, don't expect too much. We could hardly squeeze any extra performance out of the card, and any small increase was only visible in synthetic benchmark software, not noticeable in games.

Price wise, expect to pay around €40 more for this video card, we found the standard XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB priced at €280 while XFX's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB Fatal1ty can be found for €320 in the same shop. For the extra money you get the fastest GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB video card on the planet, with a full game thrown in for free. If this video card was introduced some months ago, it would have been the best deal around. Unfortunately XFX might have waited just a bit too long to launch this product. Now we are looking forward to what they can do with the new GeForce 8800 GT cards.