Without question, the hot GPU of the moment is NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT. We are a fan because it offers superb performance for a great price, which is why we use one in our machine. The fact that it packs such a punch and still retains a single slot cooler is another benefit, in our opinion. Since most GeForce 8800 GT cards begin out at $200, and it almost makes no sense to go lower for most people, unless you are looking to pick up a budget model, such as the GeForce 8600 series. Even at the $150 mark, you could acquire ATI's Radeon HD 3850, but as we'll see in the benchmarks, the performance differences are rather large, making that extra $50 a worthwhile investment. - Techgage

Palit GeForce 8800 GT 1GB Super+ Graphics Preview

Going higher is another option, but for ultimate performance, picking up an SLI board and choosing two GeForce 8800 GT cards seems to be the winning choice overall. You could pick up a single GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB for around $300 which delivers better overall performance, or splurge and purchase two GeForce 8800 GT's that would wipe the GTS version right off the map. One thing is for sure, there is a lot of choice, which can make choosing one all the more difficult. But as it stands, the GeForce 8800 GT is a fantastic offering for an all-around card, given it's performance and price range. It's really quite difficult to go wrong.

Like most manufacturers, Palit releases more than one version of each card to target each niche. The card we are looking at today includes reference clock speeds, but has its GDDR3 upgraded to a 1GB density, up from 512MB. In previous experiences, extra GPU memory will only make a difference at very large resolutions, especially if using SLI and cranking up the settings all around. It will be rare however, to see real differences with normal game play. The GPU itself will normally bottleneck before the memory, so as long as you have a card equipped with 512MB, you should be gold for resolutions scaling all the way up.

As we mentioned before, we recommend most any GeForce 8800 GT due to the performance and price. However, there are many out there, and they all fluctuate heavily in price, so you need to be careful. In the case of Palit's 1GB Super+ model, the extra memory really puts a premium on the price, costing an extra $50 over their standard model. That is not a small premium considering we saw no real benefit throughout all of our gaming benchmarks. It goes without saying, a standard GeForce 8800 GT would suit you better. At $230 on average, Palit's stock card is priced right, although a select few get even cheaper.

As far as overclocking goes, this card managed a maximum overclock of 745MHz on the core and a small overclock on the memory, at about 20MHz. The ASUS Extreme N8800 GT TOP by comparison, didn't go above 720MHz on the core but did manage a much higher memory overclock. In the end though, if Futuremark is the judge of anything, both cards scored almost identical scores, despite their varying overclocks. It all worked out in the end and the Palit Super+ version could show some extra muscles with frame buffer intensive games. This is actually the main strong point of the 1GB memory of the Palit version.

So, the particular card we took a look at is not entirely recommended unless you have a specific need for the 1GB of on-board memory, and their standard version should suit you fine since it follows NVIDIA's reference design closely. Palit is a massive company, so we'd expect to see a lot more of them this coming year. Can they prove a real threat to the already established companies? It will be tough, but given their stature elsewhere in the world, if there is one company to do it, it will likely be Palit.