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The Verdict

Alrighty, now we have tested a good number of GeForce 8800 cards already. This was the first 8800 GTX with a default overclock. Granted is does give you a little extra bang for your bucks, but the temperatures are a little worrying. When you utilize the GPU 100% during gaming the temperature in our case rose over 80 degrees C, that's quite extensive. You can easily compensate for that by allowing the fan to rotate a little faster (use Rivatuner) but with such temperatures I do not see this card getting much older than 5 years if you use it on a regular basis.

Now other then that this the 8800 GTX rocks. It's a frighteningly fast performer that'll run any game to date with the best ever image quality settings. You can now play games with 16 levels of anisotropic filtering and 16x anitaliasing enabled (if supported). How cool is that ? Framerates will fly sky-high over your screen at any resolution while the 8800 in your PC is screaming at you "is that all you can feed me ?" Yes the 8800 GTX is a very lovely card to own. A card of this caliber comes at a price though. Spending 600 bucks on a computer component just to play games is for a very small audience only. Interestingly enough, it's a large part of the Guru3D.com audience.

We still need to learn though how well the card will perform with DirectX 10 and while Windows Vista has not yet released to retail (consumer), in the OEM business & developer segment there are already many people that have it in there possession. Despite the fact that Vista has not gone retail for the consumers, we can't deny that it's already released for a large number of users. Why am I saying this ? Because at this very moment Vista driver support from NVIDIA is really dreadful as there is no official driver.

But back to the XFX product review, the GeForce 8800 GTX XXX edition. The 8800 GTX obviously will eat anything you throw at it and then shout "dude is that all?" Framerates are flying which means you can enable heaps of eye candy. You start playing your games with a monitor that supports 1600x1200 and then enable 4xAA and 16xAF. I have been playing Prey for a while at a resolution of 2560x1600 (and that's 500% more pixels over 1024x768!) at 56 frames per second with every possible setting in the game set to HIGH.

What about overclocking a pre-overclocked graphics card then? The card was extremely difficult to overclock. We got 15 MHz more out of the core before it was locking up but the memory was clockable at 1150 Mhz though, which is lovely. At it's default overclock the heat however is not an issue. We did not experience any lockups.

Do not expect a massive tweakable card unless, and this is interesting, you grab RivaTuner and start playing around with the cooling fan speeds. Heat really is an issue with the XXX model. When I simply boosted fan speed towards 100% and noticed the graphics core quickly dropping down in temperature, it crunched off 15 degrees C within a minute, play around with that if you have a need to overclock even higher than the default OC.

The XFX GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB XXX edition is a enormously sexy product in many ways. It comes however at a very steep price tag yet it'll offer you a tremendous gaming experience, that's a Guru3D guarantee.

Now then, back to Company of Heroes. Gosh that's a good game, I'm playing it butter-smooth at 2560x1600 on a really cool 30" LCD screen with this little x-rated graphics card.

Signing off, Hilbert.