There has been more said about the G92 than any mainstream part from NVIDIA since the times of GeForce 4 Ti4200. The battle between it and ATI's upcoming RV670, or Radeon HD 3800 series in warming up. These two parts are the first GPU's to come from a die-shrink of previous high-end generation with fixes of on-die bugs, a more power efficient design and of course, higher clocks. Next to that NVIDIA also stepped back from their unconventional memory bus and down scaled it to 256-bit for the GeForce 8800 GT series. Yes, no real 512-bit bus, but this is still a mid-range target card. It is instructive to compare benchmark scores between the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra. - The Inquirer

Gainward GeForce 8800 GT 512MB Graphics Review

The chip is known as the G92 series, and features 112 shader processors, a 256-bit memory controller and VP2. After all the fuss with the NVIO chip, NVIDIA fixed the video part of the GPU and now the chip can do widescreen with HDCP enabled. The chip is manufactured in 65nm process at TSMC, and in conjunction with 512MB of high-end GDDR3 memory, it will eat no more than 110W. It comes at a default clock of 600MHz for the GPU and 1800MHz for the memory. The 112 stream processors work at 1500MHz, so faster than the GeForce 8800 GTS, GTX and the Ultra models.

The board takes its design from two others on the market, the GeForce 7950 GT and GeForce 8800 GTS. The power comes down significantly with a 65nm chip, so NVIDIA was able to produce a single slot unit which it calls a more elegant GeForce 8800 GTS. The size of the board is identical to the GeForce 8800 GTS, equipped with a single slot cooler. Memory is cooled through aluminium part, while GPU is joined with copper part. In fact when you compare this board to its current competitors, GeForce 8800 series and Radeon HD 2900 series this is feather versus heavy weight fight, but the winner was not so clear cut.

We have expected a game changing product from G92 series from day one, and this is exactly what happened. Performance was quite surprising, with anti-aliasing both turned on and off. Seeing that a $250 dollar card at default clocks is competing against parts that come at double the price brings us back to legendary products. NVIDIA did a bloody good job here, and when it comes to silicon, there is no major cause for complain. NVIDIA fixed various problems from the previous generation and now you can run high definition videos at widescreen resolutions.

We don't know who works in Graphzilla's marketing department, but not calling this part the GeForce 8850 GT and confusing the market with a GT part that outperforms GTS and even surpasses GTX in a benchmark or two just make our head wonder. When it comes to the Radeon HD 3800 series, real battle is there. NVIDIA has the lead right now, but will AMD surpass Graphzilla? Bear in mind just one thing, DirectX 10.1 is just a checkbox feature right now, the real meat lies with performance in sub-optimised and too slow DirectX 10 titles. Should you go and buy this product from Gainward today?

At the end of the day, we would wholeheartedly recommend that you take the plunge and get this card if NVIDIA is dear to your heart. The G80 marchitecture got new life with this one, and seeing the high product scores on default clocks only makes us wonder what will happen with factory overclocked Golden Sample boards. This card has enough horsepower for games, but do not expect full HD performance in with single card in every game. Brilliant piece for Crysis, Hellgate and Unreal Tournament 3, which are just about to get released, so you can't go wrong there.