Anandtech 8800 Ultra review.

[imported_flounder]

Haha I misunderstood what you said. Well, with this in mind I have to agree that without a die shrink with significantly better thermals, 2 cores would not be feasible without watercooling (even with it's suspect)

 

[Tabby]

i think nvidia just did a to good of job on the 8800GTX that now there haveing a hard time trying to beat it lol

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: Laminator
Go eVGA! I think that ACS3 is a knockout product.

Werd!

 

[shabby]

I guess this is what happens when theres no competition, nvidia can do whatever they want and price the card how they see fit. And if you dont like it go buy an x2900... oh wait.

 

[Duwelon]

The 8800 Ultra is essentially a tax on the rich because nobody but the rich in their right mind would buy one over a GTX.

Edit, maybe that's Nvidia's goal: Hey guys, $500 isn't so bad now is it? see, you could pay so much more for only a little better if you really wanted to... now that $500 doesn't look so bad does it?

 

[Pugnate]

I think the 8800 Ultra was purely a miscalculation. It was supposed to get the max out of the 8800GTX card to keep the R600 from stealing any glory. And come on, most of us expected the 2900XTX to blow everyone away. I am guessing that by the time they realized that R600 couldn't compete with the 8800, it was too late.

 

[Hauk]

Excellent, excellent review Anand.

As you stated in the final words, you try to take an unbiased approach and let the reader formulate an opinion, "but not this time."

Someone posted last week if you should even review the 8800Ultra. Question answered! You get the brass balls award. Pure marketing rubbish deserves to be call out.

The 8800GTX redefined the rules. nV should be happy with that and not try to refresh with a BS product.

Sincerly,
Satisfied GTX owner

 

[Genx87]

No surprise in the specs and no surprise in the performance.

The price is ludicrious but I am sure some fool will pay for it.

 

[Kromis]

One of the greatest reviews...EVAR!

 

[schneiderguy]

I wonder why nvidia didnt go with 1gb of vram on the ultra? maybe it doesnt make a difference over 768mb (not that a small overclock makes much of a difference either )

 

[aka1nas]

They might have had to either redesign the memory controller or double the density of the memory chips, which I am not sure if it's possible to do atm. 1.5GB would be way too expensive on a video card at this point and redoing the memory controller to make it wider (and thus accomodate more chips) would also be pretty darn expensive. I'm not sure that they could have mixed capacity chips on their card, either.

 

[R3MF]

Originally posted by: schneiderguy
I wonder why nvidia didnt go with 1gb of vram on the ultra? maybe it doesnt make a difference over 768mb (not that a small overclock makes much of a difference either )

because they have a 384bit memory bus. they could not go with 1GB of memory, it was not an option.

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my question:

the reviews mention that the Ultra is based on a new, more energy efficient re-spin of the G80 GPU.

will this same re-spin be used in the GTX and GTS products too?

 

[StrangerGuy]

Just a one page review will do; no need to even bother with the benchmarks.

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: Pugnate
I disagree with the GTX comment though. The GTX version provides significant performance gains over the GTS.

I agree, the GTX and GTS have physical differences in their core (shader count), which one would expect from an Ultra card... yet the only difference can literally be made by an hour or so spent testing overclock speeds.

 

[Genx87]

Originally posted by: schneiderguy
I wonder why nvidia didnt go with 1gb of vram on the ultra? maybe it doesnt make a difference over 768mb (not that a small overclock makes much of a difference either )

I'd guess to keep production costs down. Adding more memory would require redesigning the memory controller on the GPU, then testing, then validating. For a simple refresh it probably didnt make any sense. Especially considering the lack of competition in the channel at the moment. They are probably playing it safe. If the R600 comes out and beats the 8800, they will wait it out until the G90 which is rumored to show up before the end of year.

 

[fierydemise]

:thumbsup: AT

Now C'mon AMD lets get R6xx out the door

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: R3MF
the reviews mention that the Ultra is based on a new, more energy efficient re-spin of the G80 GPU.
will this same re-spin be used in the GTX and GTS products too?

You may want to read this article.

NVIDIA also state that the new power profile doesn't affect every die cut from the wafer starts that are benefiting from the tweaks, and they also don't state what the tweaks comprise.
...
There's no way to tell if the G80-based product you're buying will exhibit the new power profile in terms of consumption.

So, you actually have no way of knowing if the die you get benefits from the power tweaks. The 8800u they tested actually had worse power consumption than a gtx, even when clocked down to regular gtx speeds. And from the reviews on other sites, the ultra always consumes more power than a gtx.