It is the black sheep of the family, alright! At first glance, it oozes with style and is just shouting out monster performance with its sleek black appearance. Considering the price, it should damn well almost smile politely back at you too.
Length wise the PCB is exactly the same as the GTX, the only difference with the dimensions is that it sits slightly higher due to the cooler that covers the entire front side of the card but this is not going to be a problem for anyone as the PCI Express power connectors are still coming out above the card through a conveniently placed hole.
We can see that the PCI Express power connectors are in the same location as the standard GTX but simply have a cover around it this time.
I/O wise is also exactly the same with a couple of dual-link DVI ports and TV out port. As you would probably already assume the card is also of course a dual slot unit.
Volume levels of the card is actually really good, while the setup of the card is different to that of the previous 8800GTX king, it uses the same kind of fan, which is quiet and does a pretty good job at keeping the card cool - clearly good enough for XFX to go a bit crazy with the clock speeds.
The standard GeForce 8800GTX comes clocked in with a 575MHz / 1350MHz / 1800MHz DDR (Core / Shader / Memory) setup. The Ultra comes along and improves upon that offering at stock 612MHz / 1500MHz / 2160MHz DDR. What this does for us is increase our memory bandwidth from 96GB/s to 103.7GB/s. Given that many companies including XFX already have 8800GTX OC cards on the market (XXX GTX operates at 630MHz core / 2000MHz DDR) and cost much less than the Ultra, its debatable if there will even be any tangible performance increases.
Luckily XFX improve upon this with their high-end 8800 Ultra XXX model which comes clocked at 675MHz / 1675MHz / 2300MHz DDR - quite an increase across the board and a big jump over the fastest GTX cards on the market. Were getting more bandwidth again which should give us a clear lead over the 8800GTX as well as the reference Ultra cards that we saw in other reviews a few days ago.
