New Ultra High End Price Point With GeForce 8800 Ultra

Final Words

Often, when reviewing hardware, it is difficult to draw a hard line and state with total confidence that our conclusions are the only logical ones that can be drawn from the facts. We try very hard to eliminate personal opinion from our reviews and provide readers with enough information to form their own educated opinions. We try to point out the downsides of the best products out there, as well as the niche uses for which otherwise disappointing hardware might shine. So often our job is about balance and temperance.

But not this time: The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra is an utter waste of money.

Let's review the facts. First, our performance data shows the 8800 Ultra to perform on par with our EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX KO ACS3. Certainly the 8800 Ultra nudges the EVGA part out of the lead, but the performance difference is minimal at best. The price difference, however, is huge. We can easily find the EVGA card for its retail price of $650, while NVIDIA expects us to pay $180 more for what amounts to a repositioned cooling fan and updated silicon. Foxconn also offers an overclocked GTX for $550 that has essentially the same clocks as the EVGA KO ACS3 (Foxconn is 630/2000 versus 626/2000 for EVGA), making $830 even more unreasonable.

Add to that the fact that we've tested over a dozen 8800 GTX parts since their launch last year, and every single card we've tested has reached higher core clock speeds than the 8800 Ultra with overclocking. We know that increasing core clock speed using nTune causes shader clock speed to increase as well. Setting an 8800 GTX core clock to 621 would give us a shader clock of ~1450MHz, coming close to the 8800 Ultra level. The extra 50MHz increase in shader clock speed won't have a very large impact on performance as we have seen in our clock scaling tests.

All this leaves memory speed as the 8800 Ultra's only real advantage: none of the memory on 8800 GTX parts we've tested can reach 1080MHz from the base 900MHz. The only problem is that this doesn't give the part enough of a boost to matter in current real world performance tests.

With GPU revisions including layout changes, process tweaks, and an improved cooling solution, the least we would expect from the creation of a new price point in the consumer graphics market is a new level of performance. Price isn't the issue here: it's all about the value. It would be difficult even for a professional gamer to justify the purchase of an 8800 Ultra over the EVGA overclocked GTX. This incarnation of the G80 is even less justifiable than Intel's Extreme processors or AMD's FX line.

Certainly, placing some value in overclockability is fair. The problem here is that the stock speed at which the card runs offers no real added value over an already available overclocked 8800 GTX. If the overclockability of the G80 A3 silicon is its key point, why not simply offer the chips to add-in card builders at a premium and allow them to make custom overclocked boards at the speeds they choose? Let them call it an 8800 Ultra without defining a (rather low) stock speed for the new cards.

If user overclocking is where it's at, then standard 8800 GTX speeds are fine. Call it an 8800 Ultra because it features A3 silicon, market it towards overclockers, and sell it at a price premium. But don't try to sell us on 612/1500/1080 clock speeds.

With a push towards targeting overclockers we have to wonder: if there is so much headroom in the 8800 Ultra, why not offer us stock clock speeds that make a real performance difference?

We are all for higher performance, and we don't mind higher prices. But it is ridiculous to charge an exorbitant amount of money for something that doesn't offer any benefit over a product already on the market. $830 isn't the issue. In fact, we would love to see a graphics card worth $830. The 8800 Ultra just isn't it.