The G92 based GeForce 8800 GT was a very exciting product, unfortunately NVIDIA was short of supply and lower priced ATI Radeon HD 3800 series gained a lot of popularity this way. The higher-end market still remained untouched and to fill up this gap NVIDIA came up with a second wave of GeForce 8800 GTS video cards. NVIDIA again took their G92 GPU and came up with something new, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB is born. And compared to the mainstream GeForce 8800 GT, this new product got 16 extra parallel rendering engines, combined with increased clock speeds you could expect a very powerful video card, much like the GeForce 8800 Ultra version. - Madshrimps

Sparkle GeForce 8800 GTS Graphics Version Review

The demand for more video memory space and faster rendering performance increased, as a results NVIDIA came up with the GeForce 8800 GT, a true killer for any mainstream video card at the time being and unfortunately haunted by a short in supply. This video card has had a very hard time finding its way to the customers. Those who had bit more money to spend had nothing to look forward to, as the GeForce 8800 Ultra remains NVIDIA's fastest card. Based on the G92 chipset, the new Sparkle GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB comes with 128 stream processors clocked at 1625MHz, while the GPU core is clocked at 650MHz.

The memory also benefits from boosted clock speed, at 1940MHz the GDDR3 memory modules are running much faster, the downside is that they are accessed via a 256-bit wide memory bus where the original GTS had a 320-bit bus. With 512MB available memory space, the new GTS is in between the 320MB and 640MB versions of the elder GTS, not exactly close to the GTX but certainly sufficient in today's games. The PCB size and heatsink design does make this card look like past GeForce 8800 series, although that you can spot small changes here and there which just make this the better solution.

A dual slot heatsink is used to active cool hot spots like GPU and memory chips, the heatsink cover makes sure that all the heated air travels out of the case instead of warming other PC components like CPU and northbridge. Just like previous high-end GeForce 8 series video cards, every card is based on the NVIDIA reference design, and they all come with the same active cooled heatsink, the only difference you may spot is the label on top of the heatsink. Sparkle gave their card a dark tint with a glossy, slightly reflective surface. The overall looks are okay as far as we can really judge such thing.

The recently released GeForce 8800 GT 512MB proved to be a very worthy replacement for the previous 320MB and 640MB version. Price wise it can be found for nearly $229 while it offered performance beyond that of the older GTS cards. At nearly the same time NVIDIA introduced the real replacement for the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB video card, and strange enough it also got named the GeForce 8800 GTS. This new video card is even more powerful graphics card then the GeForce 8800 GT, it comes with 16 extra stream processors while the clocks also have been pushed upwards to lift up the gaming performance.

Price wise, we still have our doubts. Yes, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB does leave the older GTS biting the dust, but compared to the GeForce 8800 GT there are only few benefits which you can really notice. The heatsink might be one of the most valuable things as powerful aftermarket heatsinks can increase overall cost up to $50. Gaming performance is great but as seen you may not always experience higher frame rates in-game, let alone that you will notice an actual difference in gameplay. In the end, this card has great performance for its price, but it can not match the price to performance ratio of the GeForce 8800 GT card.