Page 7 - Introducing the Cards - GeForce 8800 GTX

It's time to look at the two product themselves ..

Well hey now .. I've been rambling about the G80 core logic and Dx10 so much now that I really need to stop or otherwise this article would get too confusing. Trumpets: the two new 8800 cards !

The GeForce 8800 GTX
Be afraid .... be very afraid .. next to being a 681 million transistor accounting MONSTER (G70 had ~300 Million transistors), this is going to be the top of the line product. The big kahuna ..  the mack daddy .. the quarter pounder .. the beast that pimps your rig .. the USS Enterprice on a PCB. It's also rather exclusive as you can expect a sales price of 599 USD. Now before you point that middle finger at me hear me out okay ?

It took NVIDIA four years to build and it took 400 Million dollars to develop. Obviously in the coming year well see a stackload of products based on this new mArchitecture. But hey .. I mean this is it.. this is the graphics card you want in your uber powered PC. It has the (on 90nm fabricated) G80 core and ALL features as discussed above. It has the 128 streaming cores (Unified Shader processors), it comes with 768 MB of gDDR3 memory that theoretically can push 86 GB/second of memory bandwidth. Again.. think about that for a second. 86 GIGABYTE per second memory bandwidth that is being utilized by a 128 Shader cores with a 681 Million transistor counting micro-architecture. Frack .. I just realized that this thing is gonna consume serious power, or doesn't it ?

We'll check that out later also ;)

So this is the card with a total of 768 MB of gDDR3 memory at 384-bit (actually 12 pieces of 16Mx32 memory) with that memory clocked at 2x 900 MHz, and a "core" clock at 575 MHz with the 128 Unified Shaders running at 1350 MHz. No water-cooling solution, just a big dual-slot cooler (which actually is quite silent) on a large long black PCB with two 6-pin power connectors.

Size then .. I noticed the concern in our forums once specs started to leak out, indeed the card is very long. The GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card is 27 CM long, you could say well hung. But note that the power connectors are now routed off the top edge of the graphics card instead of the end of the card, so there is no extra space required at the end of the graphics card for power cabling. You might want to measure before buying though.

Okay, I seriously can't cram more info in such a small piece of text, we need to speed this article up a little.

Sparkle GeForce 8800 GTX 
Next to the reference model that Guru3D will test we'll also be testing a retail Sparkle GeForce 8800 GTX. So what's in the bundle, let's have a look. First thing you'll notice is that Sparkle finally is progressing onto the European market, and I do not even at the hardware yet. The box is colorful stylish designed according Western standards and much mroe appealing to see in the shops. Good on ya mate ! In the box we'll find a 100% reference NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB. The only thing different is a sticker saying it's a sparkle product. Now Sparkle will release a model of this graphics card with a non-reference cooler. That product was not ready to be submitted for this review just yet.

Bundle wise Sparkle did a nice job, they include:

• Call of Duty 2 (full version)
• Driver CD
• CyberLink PowerDVD 6
• manual
• 6-pin to Molex power cable adapters
• SVideocable
• 3-way RCA component cable for analog HDTV (who's the first board partner to include DVI to HDMI, come on guys!).
• VGA->DVI dongle

Overall this is a complete kit to get you started. Not to make this review any longer than it will be, but since the card is reference based, it follows all the specs mentioned earlier.