Official 8800 Ultra Review Discussion Thread

[gundamit]

So maybe Nvidia bumps the clocks a tad in anticipation of R600 so they can maintain the crown? Meanwhile its just a specification and price point that I imagine will be received coolly by their retail partners and consumers? Things will continue to be boring until R600 - which we needed 6 months ago. I like my 8800GTX but I want to play with something new.

[DeathReborn]

weak sauce....this is pathetic.

It doesn't deserve the label "ULTRA"... infact this should be like a "GTX KO" edition provided by EVGA at best!

I guess this is how Nvidia reacts after enjoying a brief time of monopoly,
playing it's customer's as if we were fools. It'll take some serious competition
and a reaction from the audience to force Nvidia to whoop itself back in line
and press out a good lineup that we enjoyed in the 6xxx and 7xxx series.

This is one of the main reasons we need 3 players in the market. If there were 3 players we'd have cheaper & more varied products to choose from.

On the flip side, I speculated at 650/2200 for the Ultra so if those are the specs then I was pretty darn close (except I said GDDR4, bleh).

A real Ultra would be 750+/2400+.

[Revv23]

IF it will be a "speed binding" Core of it and as this site claim, it will NOT be good for start.......Maybe THAT'S the reason why NVIDIA have provided these new drivers (158)!......Maybe they "gain" from the drivers or so!.....We will see.......IF it's true, ATI will crush it......

Hopefully we will be able to get those ati cards going on your AW9D-Max, i noticed you have that board on the bench table again.

[w0mbat]

FUDZilla==the_INQ==BS
So, stop using it as news source.

I think u are bs, cause u didnt read the source.

[DilTech]

IF it will be a "speed binding" Core of it and as this site claim, it will NOT be good for start.......Maybe THAT'S the reason why NVIDIA have provided these new drivers (158)!......Maybe they "gain" from the drivers or so!.....We will see.......IF it's true, ATI will crush it......

This card is just to make ATi show their XTX in the first place. That's it's sole purpose. They still have one big launch left this year, likely during the summer.

Of course, ATi still have 1 launch for this year as well, unless it turns out the R650 is the XTX, which really wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. It'd definitely explain why ATi aren't launching it with the XT.

[hipro5]

Hopefully we will be able to get those ati cards going on your AW9D-Max, i noticed you have that board on the bench table again.

[togaman5000]

truthfully,i can't believe those are the specs for the ultra. Like people have said,they're only a hair above factory overclocked GTXs,a fact that nVidia of all people will know. The only people that wouldn't understand that are the kind of people that don't spend hundreds on video cards. these cards are meant for the enthusiasts, and we know our stuff.

i can't presume to know what nVidia is going to do as far as the Ultra is concerned, but i doubt that a tiny speed bump is all they're gonna have. maybe GDDR4? much larger speed boost? who knows, but a couple MHz isn't enough for a company to justify 1000 dollars, regardless of DX10 market share

[FghtinIrshNvrDi]

it's not going to be $1000. If something will be a thousand dollars, it would be a dual g80 setup. No single card is going to cost 1000, especially on a 6 month old arch.

Ryan

[afireinside]

This is old news... but perkam deleted the thread before people saw it

Anyway it's pretty sad that nvidia had to pull this.

[onewingedangel]

Who's to say that the ultra isn't just to clear stocks of g80 in anticipation of g81?

If g90 is out at the end of the year, theres not a great ammount of time for a die shrink g8x part.

If nvidia is already producing g81 components ready for a launch a month or two down the line, slapping an 8900 cards cooler on a 8800gtx and calling it an ultra may just be to help clear out the last g80 cores.

My personal belief is the ultra will be at the same price the gtx is currently, and the gtx will fall in price to give it a better price:performane compared to ati's offering.

[Dainas]

Well atleast the 8800GTX scales really nicely breaking the 600mhz barrier but going from 620 to 650 has shown to be mostly pointless. The Ultra would have been alot better served with 1200mhz GDDR4.

[dinos22]

That, and perhaps the addition of the HD video processing silicon... Since the mid-range cards now have the capability, I was wondering if that was going to be added to the top of the line at some point, and this might be where they introduce it.

it won't be added

[virtualrain]

Latest report on the Ultra (again, from a less than reputable source although this sounds more likely than the supposed "Dell leak")...

These are final specs for the 8800 Ultra.

GPU: 675MHz
Mem: 2.35GHz
Shader: 1.60GHz

8800 Ultra still has 128 Stream processors based on 90nm process and has 384-bit bus connected to a 768MB memory GDDR3 type (1.0ns).

For more details about 8800 Ultra,
http://www.fx57.net/?p=613

http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?t=146517

Is that the same memory as existing cards (1.0ns)? If so, I suppose it may be possible with water cooling to flash this BIOS into your existing GTX.

[polarbear]

650Mhz core
and 2080Mhz Mem
I can allready buy that, but it is named Asus 8800Gtx Aquatank

[mascaras]

http://we.pcinlife.com/thread-756180-1-1.html

[p0tter]

thats sexy

[grimREEFER]

this is a factory overclocked card, given the term ultra for marketing purposes.

[virtualrain]

BTW, according to this Asian site which is the source of the pic that is circulating around, the specs are a bit higher than those leaked by Dell (or Fud)...

Core: 675MHz
Shader: 1.6GHz
Memory: 2.35GHz

[xB0n3s]

Will it be much faster than a superclocked EVGA 8800 GTX? I just like to know.

[DeathReborn]

According to the stINQ it's a big waste of a name.

Final 8800 Ultra specs disappoint

NVIDIA WILL UNLEASH the 8800 Ultra to the world on May 2nd at 6AM PST - 15:00 CET, but atypically for Nvidia, this will be a paper launch.
Yes, you've read it correctly, this will not be a hard one, but rather launch results of benchmarks and announce availability for the third week of May.

This time, Graphzilla decided not to trust any of its partners and just decided that the partners will receive the board after the NDA expiry date, to stop renegade websites from filing reviews of leaked hardware. The partners we have talked with are sincerely disappointed at Nvidia and consider this a breach of trust.

Also, what makes things very worrying in the Nvidia-partner relationship is the fact that some companies are more preferred than others, and there is a certain memory company that is raising quite a few eyebrows.

You see, in order to be able to buy 8800GTX, a lot of partners have to buy up to 8-9-10-11 GPUs of a lower grade - that is the 7300, 7600 and now 8300, 8400, 8500, 8600 - while some partners are allowed to get just the highest end cards.

We are not sure how the situation will resolve with 8800 Ultra, but the final specs we have learned and are present on the boards given to reviewers, only and exclusively by Nvidia, are rather disappointing.

The GPU is not clocked to 675MHz, as some official documents from the past were stating, but rather a very conservative 612MHz, a 37MHz clock boost. The clock of 128 scalar units has been raised from 1.35GHz to 1.50 and memory is set at 2.16GHz instead of 1.80GHz, raising the memory bandwidth from 86.4GB/s to 103.68GB/s, still a couple of gigabytes short of upcoming Radeon HD 2900XT, with its 105.60GB/s.

Everything else remains the same as it was on the 8800GTX, and some partners suggest schematics how to create an 8800Ultra from a single 8800GTX board - an interesting turn of events indeed. Can you say... voltmod?

Yes, you have read this correctly - in order to create an 8800Ultra, you would have to search the search engines of today for schematics of 8800GTX and raise the voltage of the memory by two 0.05V notches, and the clock of 2.13GHz should be achieveable by almost every 8800GTX board out there. µ

Source (Inquirer)

[FghtinIrshNvrDi]

they're serious?

marketing for suckers.

Ryan

[deathman20]

If the article DeathReborn linked is true. Well really the only up side to the card is that it had a v-mod done to the memory to go further and a better heatsink from what we've been hearing.

Not horrible not the best, I would of expected more. Then again its not like they need to push themselves far to increase there lead further from ATI/AMD.

[virtualrain]

If the article DeathReborn linked is true. Well really the only up side to the card is that it had a v-mod done to the memory to go further and a better heatsink from what we've been hearing.

Not horrible not the best, I would of expected more. Then again its not like they need to push themselves far to increase there lead further from ATI/AMD.

This is the sad truth of the ATI DX10 debacle... nVidia is under no pressure to either lower prices or increase performance.

[J-Mag]

It doesn't deserve the label "ULTRA"... infact this should be like a "GTX KO" edition provided by EVGA at best!

WHy? The 6800ultra was just a higher clocked 6800gt.

[xVeinx]

Notice that they are announcing it the same day that ATI is announcing their lineup. Couldn't be that they are trying to steal ATI's thunder or anything