What is the XFX 8800 Ultra?

The XFX card comes packaged in a menacing looking box, there is the usual XFX “mascot”, a mean looking dog, and the front of the box gives us a little detail on the specifications (noting that its PCI-Express and has 768Mb of memory). There is also a sticker stating that Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is included as a free game incentive. Whilst the front could probably do with a little more product info we can't fault XFX as the sides and rear of the packaging make up for this.

Inside the outer box we find another, thicker box which contains the graphics card and bundle. The XXX comes with all of the essentials such as DVI>VGA converters, video out cables and driver CD. As mentioned above Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is included. Whilst not the newest title it is still fun, visually impressive and should be a good introduction to the power of the Ultra. One other point worthy of noting is the level of protection XFX give their products. First up we have the outer box and thicker inner box. Within this the card is protected by several inches of foam and should withstand a huge level of courier inadequacy.

The card itself is very imposing. As soon as we opened the anti-static bag we were impressed by the design with the jet black cooler covering the whole surface of the PCB. Because of this the card feels bigger than the GTX however it is exactly the same length with only the edges of the cooler varying in size between models. Power requirements for this card are a 550w PSU with 12V current of at least 35A.

Underneath the cooler we have a G80 core on a reference PCB/memory design. Despite the reference layout the cards detailed specifications are anything but reference. The core is running at 650MHz, this is 75Mhz more than the GTX's reference 575Mhz. The memory clock on the XXX is an incredible 2260Mhz, around 460Mhz faster than the stock GTX (20% increase). As with the GTX the Ultra uses a 384bit memory bus and GDDR3. The memory chips used on this model are Samsung K4J52324QE-BJ08 and rated at 0.8ns/1250Mhz. Finally we have an increase in the shader clock from 1350MHz on the GTX to 1620MHz.

These are hugely impressive statistics and that's probably understating things quite considerably! So how does this compare to the reference 8800 Ultra, here's a quick run-down:

	Reference Ultra	XFX XXX	% increase
Core Speed	612	650	6
Memory Speed	1080 (2160)	2260	5
Shader Speed	1500	1620	8

Overall that's some decent increases over the Nvidia Ultra reference specification and the shader clock increase alone over the GTX (17%) should help the XFX Ultra surpass the older part by a considerable margin.

So that's the main differences between the GTX and Ultra outlined, and yes it is pretty much just a clock speed bump and a minor core revision (A2-A3). Just to clarify, the card still supports all of the same features as the GTX such as DirectX 10, Shader Model 4, OpenGL 2.0, PureVideo, SLI and HDTV out. It also has Dual-Link DVI's capable of powering displays up to 2560x1600 and features Nvidia's programmable design so that the 128 stream processors can be assigned to various tasks from vertex and pixel operations to geometry and physics.

For a more in-depth outline of the G80 please see HERE