A bit late on posting this, but for those who missed it, nVidia has introduced a new top-end 8800, the GeForce 8800 Ultra. Here's a snip from the Tech Report's review: Yet the Ultra is distinct for several reasons. First and foremost, Nvidia says the Ultra packs a new revision of G80 silicon that allows for higher clock speeds in a similar form factor and power envelope. In fact, Nvidia says the 8800 Ultra has slightly lower peak power consumption than the GTX, despite having a core clock of 612MHz, a stream processor clock of 1.5GHz, and a memory clock of 1080MHz (effectively 2160MHz since it uses GDDR3 memory). That's up from a 575MHz core, 1.35GHz SPs, and 900MHz memory in the 8800 GTX. Other reviews can be seen over at: Anandtech Guru of 3D [H]ard|OCP Hot Hardware Hexus PC Perspective Enjoy!
I've read somewhere that the original 8800 can be manually modified to get the same performance as the 8800 ultra. But the ultra edition is just a way to get away the attention of the new upcoming ATI cards.
Yeah, nVidia really kinda fumbled on this one. An 8800GTX is what $600 or so, and then the next step up is asking $829.99? R600 is supposed handle 1GB of RAM, while the 8 series right now is topped out a 768MB. The Ultra is a real weak release...but then again, there's definitely those with more money than brains, so nVidia will sell a few...very, very few. nVidia's marketing department needs to have their head examined.
