Well not all might know this GeForce 8800 card that we are looking at today, as this card was actually released rather silently without making much noise about it. It is not the first time that NVIDIA has done this, but it is somehow rather limited to products that don't last that long or meant mainly for the OEM market, which is why not every brand has one of these graphics cards. The XFX GeForce 8800 GS XXX Alpha Dog Edition is a fearless beast. While the reference cards run at 550MHz core, 1357MHz shader and 1600MHz memory speed, the XFX card is significantly overclocked, and it definitely reflects on the performance. Well, you don't name a card Alpha Dog just for kicks. - FudZilla

XFX GeForce 8800 GS XXX Alpha Dog Edition Review

Technically speaking, the GeForce 8800 GS is not that much different from a GeForce 8800 GT or GTS, as they share one heart, namely the 65nm G92 chipset. The actual difference is the memory interface, as the GeForce 8800 GS has a crippled 192-bit version, while the GeForce 8800 GT and GTS have a 256-bit interface. Due to this, the memory numbers are somewhat odd and you'll see them in 384MB and 768MB versions. There are 96 shader processors, which means that the GeForce 8800 GS has 6 out of 8 shader clusters enabled and 12 raster operation units, which is again less than for the GT version.

Like the rest of NVIDIA's G92 pack, the GeForce 8800 GS is a DirectX 10 card with Shader Model 4.0 and PCI Express 2.0. It has a 6-pin power connector and the fan is a bit wider than the one on the GeForce 8800 GT cards, but it's still single slot. As seen in the name, the XXX stands for 680MHz core speed, with 384MB of GDDR3 memory running at 1600MHz. Apart from the serious core overclock, the shaders also got a boost and now run at 1700MHz. XFX uses an Evercool two-ball bearing fan, that blows cool air onto the copper fins. The entire cooler base is made out of copper and the fan is placed on the cooler base.

The pre-overclocked XFX GeForce 8800 GS XXX card runs at 680MHz core and 1700MHz for shader processors. In fact the GeForce 8800 GS XXX core speeds are the highest among the cards we checked out today, but the crippled G92 core is just not enough to fight the GeForce 8800 GT or GTS cards. The 96 stream processors and 192-bit memory interface with 384MB of memory made this card clearly inferior to the GeForce 8800 GT. The GeForce 8800 GS's fiercest competitor is ATI's Radeon HD 3850, but XFX's version has made it clear that some extra cash will definitely positively reflect on the performance.