There's no secret here, we wholeheartedly have an unnatural amount of love for XFX as it continually delivers excellent products that push the envelope of retail based NVIDIA GPU's. It unabashedly is an enthusiast company in both its approach to its products and from the folks who work for it and that attitude definitely shines in its latest GeForce 8800 GT dubbed Alpha Dog. Although it borrows heavily from NVIDIA's reference design, XFX like always has a few spins on the product that help define it into its own and clearly help differentiate it from the competition. And that is exactly what XFX has done over the passing years with every product so far, which makes it all the more intersting. - Boot Daily

XFX GeForce 8800 GT 512MB Alpha Dog Card Review

The oversized cooling fan is larger than other similar cards we've seen so far which use the same reference cooler. This lets the XFX design spin the fan at a slower rate for lower noise but still have excellent cooling properties. Additionally, XFX always puts a black colored bar which runs the length of the card sporting the XFX moniker. We're not a huge fan of the single slot design much anymore as it has no way to exhaust the heat outside of the PC. While single slot design does have its merit with less space taken up it's the issue of where does all the heat go, that's paramount to us and why we prefer dual slot cooling solutions.

While it borders on being cheesy, its Alpha Dog edition of graphics cards are meant to portray its high-end solutions which generally have factory tweaks on them which means right out of the gate that you'll be using a very fast product. Several companies have tried to emulate XFX's overclocking and other tweaks, however few have the same successful track record XFX can boast of. The GeForce 8800 GT is still far and away one of the best GPU values going at this time as it has excellent performance, relatively low power consumption and is priced in such a way that makes it affordable for the mainstream consumers.

What makes it so good is that it's built on a 65 nanometer process which means that NVIDIA was able to give it 112 stream processors while still running at much higher clock rates than the previous generation of GTS cards. The end result is a card that thinks it's a GTX, yet costs about half the amount. XFX clocks this card at 625MHz on the core and 1800MHz effective onthe 512MB of GDDR3 memory. What this translates into is a product that's priced very competitively and has performance better than many cards in its class. No games are bundled which helps keep the price down and pass the savings on to its customers.

So this is a video card that's perfect for mind-range LCD's as their widescreen resolution is a real sweet spot for this card's performance under many of today's hottest PC games. Frankly, there's little reason to worry about SLI as most folks who'd spring for a card like this are most likely running well under a 27-inch LCD. We would have no hesitations recommending this card to anyone seeking an incredible value in today's leading retail video cards. Factor in XFX's double lifetime warranty and you really do have a combination of price, performance and protection that's the darling on the graphics industry.