As we wander over to the door on a typical Tuesday afternoon we are greeted by the usual fellow, a courier. With a box in hand and PDA for us to sign we were expecting what was just going to be another run of the mill sample. Generally speaking, we see who it's shipped from and remember what exactly it is before we put it in a pile which has an imaginary to do sign above it. But this was different, so we open the white box not knowing what to expect and low and behold, there is a note. Yes, a note with one simple sentence, you know what to do... Below that note was a graphics card, the highly anticipated GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB featuring the G92 chip. - TweakTown

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS (G92) 512MB Card Review

In an all black OEM design there isn't a whole lot to see when faced straight on with the GeForce 8800 GTS. Unlike the GeFroce 8800 GT we find ourselves with a dual slot cooler which carries with it a bigger fan. This generally means two things for us, less noise and better cooling. The cooler of course takes up pretty much the whole front of the card with only a PCI Express port showing at the bottom. The design of the card is all very standard for today's generation. Heading to the right of the card we have a single PCI Express power connector between the plastic from the heatsink and the PCB.

Getting down to the nitty gritty there are some key details we should make mention of. Based on the new G92 core, we have the standard features to come with it such as PCI Express 2.0, a 65nm die and one to one texture addressing units to texture filtering units. These are the features we know to be standard across all of the upcoming GeForce 8800 GTS G92 based graphics cards, but as far as model specifics go we have in this case 512MB of GDDR3 memory. That 512MB comes clocked in at 1940MHz effective while the core and shader clocks come in at 650MHz and 1625MHz respectively.

It shouldn't come as any real surprise that the new G92 based GeForce 8800 GTS is quite the performer. This really opens up a whole lot of questions though, and how exactly NVIDIA attack the market with this card will be interesting as well. NVIDIA always takes pride in having stock when the NDA is lifted, and it doesn't look like this is going to be any different. A few suppliers have told us that they have ordered their stock and come December 11th they will be shipping their cards off to the local retailers. This is all good and well, but the GeForce 8800 GT had stock for about five minutes.

Will we see the same issue with the new GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB? Well, for starters the card is going to cost about $50-100 more than the price of the GeForce 8800 GT. The problem is that the GeForce 8800 GT is in such short supply that the card's price has been jacked up $50-75 meaning that the card could almost come in at the same price. This is what we personally think will happen all over again, the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB will be gone. NVIDIA have released it and caused a big drama by getting everyone excited and taking the attention away from the Radeon HD 3870 accelerator.

The 256MB version of the GeForce 8800 GT will come out and of course it won't be as good as the 512MB version, though it should run off the already well established name. The GTS will come in on December 11th and be fairly well priced at around $299-349. With all that said though, what are our thoughts on the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB? Well, quite frankly we love it. We thought we would do a quick little overclock of the card before we wrapped things up. With a core speed of 720MHz and 2104MHz effective on the 512MB of GDDR3 we managed to climb up quite nicely on the benchmark scores.

The GeForce 8800 GTX stock has pretty much dried up and is overpriced now. The Ultra is just an absolute sick waste of money and the Radeon HD 3870 really has nothing on the new G92 based variant of the GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card. This means that if you're looking for a top video card this Christmas the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB is probably going to be the card you're looking at. When the NDA lifts early next month we will begin to look at some brands and see what they've managed to do with the new GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB graphics card.