NVIDIA's 8800 Ultra - Pimp my 8800GTX - Ladies and gents...
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 02 May 2007

Ladies and gents...

... let us present you, the hot, the new, the latest - 8800 Ultra! Was that good enough? OK,back to things that really mater. First and foremost, according to our sources and NVIDIA, this is not the same chip, it's actually a new revision of the G80 silicon fine-tuned so it can go stock on 612MHz core, 1500MHz Shader and 2160MHz memory clock. Pre-launch, we got some info about the fact that this combination still leaves some headroom for overclocking, which was mostly not the case with the first chip revision. For example, Point of View's 8800GTX Exo edition stocked at 600MHz (Shader clock 1350MHz, memory clock 1900MHz), ASUS's Aquatank (630MHz core, 2060MHz memory, Shader clock 1458MHz, check out our review here), and XFX's 8800GTX XXX edition stocked at 630MHz core, 2000MHz memory and 1400MHz Shader clock. But after that, there was little or no OC headroom at all. The new Ultra card is 10.5" long, so - the same thing as the 8800GTX. Make sure you check out our initial 8800 series Tech Preview.

The cooler is a little bit changed when compared to 8800GTX, as you can clearly see on the picture. We might say that it's not actually the cooler but thermal solution design that's changed, and the cooler has been moved on the edge of the board. This makes it stick a bit outside the board in the horizontal axis. We think that the cooler design of both 8800GTX and 8800 Ultra are very good - not too loud but powerful enough. NVIDIA actually claims that they were able to keep the power usage at the same (and a bit lower) level when compared to 8800GTX due to some optimizations done on the chip itself. This should still be a very important factor when comparing 8800 series to AMD's Radeon 2900 series - NVIDIA's products consume less power so - we might just call NVIDIA's products more power efficent. We have to say that we don't think the board to be any warmer and/or louder then the GTX version, which we consider to be a good thing in times when VGA cards consume so much power...

Ultra still has 128 SP's (Stream Processor) that can do any kind of work - geometry, vertex, pixel or physics (32 texture address callculations, 64 texture filtering operations per clock). The memory clock, now 1080MHz (2160MHz effectively) gives us the biggest change from the 8800GTX - bandwidth now peaks at 101 GB/s, 17% more then the 8800GTX (84,6 GB/s). These numbers are pretty impressive and close to AMD's statements for Radeon 2900 series (AMD says - over 100 GB/s). Texture filtering rate is up 6.5% when compared to GTX (36.8 GT/s vs 39.2 GT/s), as well as the Fill rate (trilinear, anisotropic 2:1, 64-bit) - 18.4 vs 19.6 GT/s. The memory size remained the same - 768MB, as well as the power scheme - two 6-pin PCI-E connectors.

The pricing is set to ?699 or $829 for the USA market. This is a bit lower then we expected at first, seeing some reports online, but we feel that it will also be very dependent on availability. Also, you should note that these cards should be in the stores around May 15th.

Of course, we used our standard testing equipment:

- EVGA's NFORCE 680i-based motherboard
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
- OCZ's Platinum XTC PC2-8500 memory, 2x1GB
- WD's RaptorX
- Dell's 30" LCD