For many enthusiasts looking for a new GPU, it would seem best to wait for the GeForce 9 series which will be coming from NVIDIA over the next few months. However, what do you do if you happen to want something now? Well, the latest card from the green camp is the GeForce 8800 GTS refresh with 512MB of memory. The GeForce 8800 GTS refresh is the second of NVIDIA's cards to sport the G92 processor. And it's an improvement over the original G80 GTS chip in several ways. Next to that it brings a faster clocked chip which is cheaper, though has a tiny reduction on one aspect, namely the memory interface. Taken all things into consideration, is it worth it's price tag? - XSReviews

XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB XXX Graphics Review

The first and foremost is the size reduction from 90nm to 65nm. While it retains the unfied shader architecture of previous cards, this allows it to run cooler and therefore probably quieter due to the need for lower levels of cooling. Like the GeForce 8800 GT before it, the GTS is PCI Express 2.0 compliant and comes with the same PureVideo 2.0 logic which adds a bitstream processor and some enhanced video processing to offload the H.265 decoding. Another difference between the new GTS and it's predecessor is the increase in stream processors from 96 to 128, in line with the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra cards.

The XFX box is the usual black and green affair with some specification buttons, large text showing off the products name and an image of the XFX mascot, the warrior dog thing. The back of the box has a performance comparison table and a what my graphics card can do column within. There are also the usual in-game screenshots to wet your appetite and in this case, Crysis and Hellgate London. The GTS itself has similar artwork to that of the box, mostly black with some green styling. There's also another half face of the dog warrior, looking mad. This is simply the sticker that covers the shroud, which hides the card's cooling.

Having had great overclocking results with the original GTS, we were quite looking forward to seeing what the 65nm version was capable of. Using nTune we were able to take the card from its stock of 678MHz core and 1972MHz memory to 802MHz and 2166MHz respectively. We were able to raise both substantially higher but this was the top benchmark stable frequency. We imagine with some more tweaking we could see some very impressive figures. Its pretty clear from the results that NVIDIA did a pretty good job beefing up the GTS for it's sequel, giving it a clear lead over the original in every benchmark we ran.

We admit that the overclock doesn't do a lot in some cases, but that's where the CPU will be holding the GPU back. While it might not have as much bang for buck as the GeForce 8800 GT, the GTS does offer good value for money, and it features a reasonably quiet cooler. Unfortunately, the fact that the GeForce 9 series cards are just around the corner doesn't help the GTS, and it probably is best to wait. However, if you want an immediate jump up from your older GTS or anything before the GeForce 9 series surface, the GTS refresh from XFX is a pretty good bet.