Introduction

So you read the reviews on the brand new reference Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics card the other day, and you thought “Hey! GeForce Ultra is not that Ultra at all!” It is currently without a doubt at the top of the graphics card leader board at the moment, king of the hill by a long way but the former crown holder 8800 GTX was already doing pretty well, anyway. The tweaked out G80 GPU is Nvidia’s answer preemptive strike to whatever AMD might come out with later this month in their new R600 range.

Let’s find out if the Ultra can be truly and fully “Ultra” with the help of XFX and all the overclockers that work at the company who want to give us nothing but performance and huge amounts of it.

That is right – we are talking about retail GeForce 8800 Ultra, the type you actually buy in the shop. This is not just any ordinary 8800 Ultra though, it is an XXX edition (factory overclocked and at the highest end of the XFX range, which usually means top out of all the Nvidia partner brands) and trust us, by the time we finished with it, we thought that it deserved that XXX stamp well and truly.

There is not much point going into too much detail on the GPU itself as it’s really just a GeForce 8800GTX on steroids - increase clocks across the board gives us more bandwidth - there are no other changes, it is just a refresher product. Nvidia claims a newer revision chip is used which is the reason for being able to pump out the higher clock speeds – maybe they just got lucky with some better than expected factory yields, nevertheless, the 8800 Ultra is here.

Let us have a look at exactly what XFX are offering us today and see if it’s worth getting or not. After all, that is a very important question, as it does come with an RRP of around $1400 AUD in Australia or around $1000 - $1100 USD in the United States. Yep, and unless you are reading whilst rolling around in your secured money pit right now, you thought the regular 8800 Ultra was excessively expensive at $850 USD.