As the Christmas rush reaches a crescendo of credit card swipes and internet orders, you may well be hoping that Santa brings you a shiny graphics card, letting you play the latest games and watch full screen Blu-ray and HD DVD content on your PC without having to trash the CPU. You'd want something meaty, imbued with gobs of texturing and shading power, but feel that even Santa won't be benevolent enough to dole out GeForce 8800 Ultra's to all and sundry. Should your budget be on the south side of $330, Zotac reckons it has the graphics card for you in the form of the GeForce 8800 GT AMP! edition. Better than the Radeon HD 3870 and its G92 contemporaries? - Hexus

Zotac GeForce 8800 GT 512MB AMP! Version Review

Zotac has now released three distinct GeForce 8800 GT cards, including an HDMI equipped model, and two pre-overclocked models. We received the higher specified AMP! edition for evaluation. Clocking in at 700MHz core, 1674MHz shader and 2000MHz for the memory, the AMP! edition retains the single slot cooler found on the NVIDIA reference model. The standard Zotac part will ship with 660/1800MHz frequencies with the shader set at 1600MHz. For what it's worth, the fan is illuminated with a funky orange color, kind of matching the heatsink's cover. Perhaps Zotac should tie-up with the makers of Beowulf?

The GPU also features NVIDIA's PureVideo HD, helping to hardware accelerate decoding of Blu-ray and HD DVD titles encoded with efficient codecs. You'll know that the new SKU's conduit is based on PCI Express 2.0. The Zotac GeForce 8800 GT 512MB AMP! edition frequencies are the highest we've seen from a shipping G92 card, intimating careful speed binning of cores. The downside of such pre-overclocking is price, unfortunately. The card is currently available for $330, or $40 more expensive than the standard card and $25-30 dearer than other lesser overclocked models.

Zotac is upfront about the card's credentials, indicating the 256-bit memory bus on the box cover. Indicating that Zotac is playing the overclocking game without much of a safety net, we were unable to overclock the core and/or shader speeds above the default 700MHz without running into stability related problems. The GDDR3 memory was inched up to an effective 2072MHz, up from the pre-overclocked 2000MHz. We like NVIDIA's G92 and we were waiting for retail cards to hit the shelves with bated breath. That anticipation was partly borne out of the hugely attractive price and the G80 derived technology.

The retail GeForce 8800 GT 512MB cards were available in small-ish quantities just after launch, yet the following weeks have been plagued with constraint issues, pushing pricing higher and higher. The upshot is that a default clocked GeForce 8800 GT 512MB will cost you around $250, assuming you can find it in stock, and overclocked models all the way up to $340. The Zotac GeForce 8800 GT AMP! edition tips the scales at $330, making it, naturally, one of the most expensive G92 based cards available. The AMP! edition ships with impressive clock frequencies and performance as a result.

NVIDIA's now officially launched the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB and the cheapest retail models cost around $35 more than the Zotac version, so it will be interesting to see how it stacks up as soon as we have one in to be checked. You may also opt for the cheaper Radeon HD 3870 512MB on the basis of price, but, right now, the Zotac is probably the best single card buy under $330. We'd prefer it to be slightly cheaper and the bundle could really do with a decent gaming title. As it is, the Zotac GeForce 8800 GT 512MB AMP! edition has just enough going for it to be recommended.