Today we will show you a product review based on NVIDIA's latest newborn, the GeForce 8800 GT graphics card. Well, let's just re-phrase that to NVIDIA latest product based on a smaller 65nm TSMC silicon production. See, this card was firstly rumored to be the GeForce 8700 GT. But hey, NVIDIA faced a bit of a challenge. If you are arming an updated silicon with 112 shader processors and an optional 512MB of memory, chances then are that such a product will perform just as well as their current high-end range graphics cards. So what we are looking at today is the performance of two GeForce 8800 GT's, interlinked via the well known SLI technology. - Guru3D

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB SLI Version Review

This product should and will replace that somewhat handicapped GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, not only in performance yet also in price. Honestly, that 320MB version of the GTS ever since the beginning was my sweet spot graphics cards wise, yet the moment DirectX 10 games became available, it also became more appearant that DirectX 10 is utilizing the framebuffer quite extensively. Mark my words, when DirectX 10 actually becomes popular, your graphics adapter is best off with 512MB memory or higher. It makes a lot of sense, the shader code is much more complex and thus longer, the texture limit sizes are bumped up.

The GeForce 8800 GT 512MB will fill a gap, a gap that the 320MB model has set. Yet due to it's lower pricing will compete directly with the GeForce 8600 GTS, which is interesting as the GeForce 8800 GT will annihilate that graphics card performance wise. Do expect to see the prices in mid-range GeForce 8600 series collapse due to this as quite honestly, we do not see a point for you guys to buy a GeForce 8600 GT or GTS any longer if your budget allows it. Other than the number of shader processors, a move to a smaller fabrication, there really isn't a heap of new stuff feature wise opposed to the GeForce 8 product line.

The new GT cards are surely pretty to the eyes. A nice slim single slot design. The silicon powering that card is based on NVIDIA's new 65nm silicon. Is this a respin product you ask? Yes and no, but not exactly, but kinda, as it's pretty much the good old G80 core yet with one exception, the fabrication processed was moved from 90nm towards 65nm, meaning a smaller die-size, likely resulting in lower core voltages, more energy efficiency and perhaps better clock speeds. The one thing that is very odd, yet interesting though, is that the GeForce 8800 GT has an increased amount of shader processors over the GTS series.

So it ends here my friends. Well, the article that is. We must say that we are quite thrilled with this release. It brings back that good feeling when the GeForce 6800 GT was launched. Man, did we love that product at that time. This is NVIDIA at it's best. The sheer amount of shader cores, clocks and memory configurations versus the pricing is making us go woohoo. With a sidenote though. We feel that current graphics adapters have a really hard time with the new DirectX 10 titles. The GeForce 8800 GT 512MB with this kind of horsepower at the advertised price is a very nice step in the proper direction.

It's consuming 105 Watts at maximum. With that being said, there's hardly anything we could think of that would get this product in a bad lighting, so that forces us to say yes, this is a really good product. The one thing we did not like is the thermal solution, although the GPU can sustain it, temperatures will get close to 90°C which we think is too high. So although the cooler looks sexy and slim, it certainly is performing less than the dual slot cooler we have seen on for example the GTS. It's more noisy as well. All things considered, this is the only disapproving feature we can think of.