EVGA e-GeForce 8800 Ultra Superclock

Overclocking:

After a few hours of tweaking, we managed to get EVGA's e-GeForce 8800 Ultra Superclocked running without heat problems or artifacting at 682MHz core and 2398MHz on the memory. This represents a four percent increase in core clock and a 6.5 percent increase in memory bandwidth. Together, the clock speed increases us to improve performance across the board by between two and five percent, depending on the scenario.

Final Thoughts...

EVGA’s e-GeForce 8800 Ultra Superclocked is quite simply the fastest graphics card we have ever tested in the bit-tech labs. It delivered some blistering frame rates in all of the games we tested, and for the most part it has enough performance on tap to feed your gaming needs at 2560x1600.

Of course, this may change with the arrival of more stressful DirectX 10 titles, and if Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is anything to go by, you're looking at fairly solid performance at 1920x1200 with a single GeForce 8800 Ultra. In order to attain decent frame rates at 2560x1600 with anti-aliasing in next-generation titles, you're going to need at least a pair of GeForce 8800 GTXs running in SLI.

Speaking of SLI, performance in F.E.A.R. needs to be worked on, because scaling is pretty poor with the 158.18 WHQL drivers. There are newer beta drivers out, but we haven't had chance to test them across the range of titles we use for our reviews yet. Hopefully, we'll see Nvidia achieve scaling close to what we've seen in this title under Windows XP - if that happens soon, a pair of Radeon HD 2900 XTs in CrossFire will no longer be competition for two GeForce 8800 GTXs.

Getting back to EVGA's card and bundle, we think that it's a good product, but it's priced out of the grasp of most early adopters, nevermind the enthusiasts that regularly read bit-tech. It just doesn't offer enough value for money over EVGA's e-GeForce 8800 GTX Superclocked card, which is over £100 cheaper. This isn't uncommon for products based on Nvidia's GeForce 8800 Ultra GPU though, because the initial cards clocked at reference speeds were priced well out of the market too.

At least the price has come down a little bit, but we can't help but feel it needs to come down further still. The reference clocked GeForce 8800 Ultras start at around £470 (inc VAT) now, but we don't believe that the minuscule performance between it and EVGA's Superclocked 8800 GTX warrants a £50 price premium - £20 would be more acceptable in our book. As for EVGA's heavily overclocked GeForce 8800 Ultra that we've looked at here, we think that it needs to come down below £500 before it's going to be an attractive proposition.

The current pricing structure just places it in the bracket for those with more money than sense. A shame, because that's about the only thing wrong with this product.

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