Page 12 - The Conclusion
The Verdict
With the GeForce 8800 GT Dual Turbo ECS brings a pretty interesting product to the table. Let's discuss some facts. Even the 8800 GT reference product in all its ways is a knight in shining armor. The value is just really grand, yet once board-partners & manufacturers start changing the product then that's where it really is getting interesting for me as a reviewer. I like the little extras. The custom cooler, blue PCB even the little RAM sinks (which from a technical perspective pretty much are futile to be honest) make the product aesthetically very pleasing.
What I love about the product is the sheer silence. With the dual fans enabled you'll still be amazed about the fact how quiet it really is, and that's just great. There are a couple of deficits though. You need to realize that with the FANs installed you'll eat up three precious PCI slots in your PC. And that's a lot. The cooler unfortunately is the size of a whale.
Also, if you were planning SLI in the future then this is not the card for you, my man. The SLI finger is blocked by the Arctic S1 cooler, you will not be able to bridge the cards. These are pretty much the only negatives though.
While ECS pre-overclocked the product for you, you still have a little extra headroom to overclock even further, I suggest that you fool around with memory a little, there's a lot of leverage to be found in there. The core/shader overclock was a little average though. Furthermore, this is a classic GeForce 8800 GT in all its ways. In the first line of this conclusion I already used the verb knight in shining armor for the 8800 GT. This is a knight in an upgraded shining armor. The 8800 GT is a classic, it's a hit that offers a stack load of performance for the money and features.
It's an aesthetically pleasing to look at product and you are bound to have a lot of fun and it'll offer you a really nice gaming experience up-to 1600x1200 with all eye-candy enabled, that's a Guru3D assurance. Combined with a two year warranty I'd say this is a pretty safe bet. Due to its great (low) noise-levels this also might be a fantastic VGA card to use in a HTPC. You'll be able to play games really well, you can post-process & decode Blu-ray & HD-DVD over the GPU, have the crypto HDCP chip embedded and all that at little to low noise. Pretty nice feature set for the money, wouldn't you agree?
This is the gear we like so much to see and this coming from an OEM manufacturer was a very pleasant surprise. Keep 'em coming ECS, keep 'em coming.
ECS Geforce 8800 GT Dual Turbo
Info: ECSSKU: N8800GT512MX+
Price: $259.99 USD / 199 EUR
