Sigh. Don’t you just hate it when you come home after buying the biggest and best thing available, only to find your highly competitive neighbor proudly wielding the newly-released version up from the one you just bought? It’s a series of events we see unfold all the time in the entertainment world, whether on the small screen in cartoons, or on the big screen in movies like “Borat: …”. However common this scenario may be on TV, it probably doesn’t happen all too much in real life. People are generally complacent when it comes to expensive purchases. If you get “outdone” in the real world as described above, chances are you won’t be going back to the store to buy an even bigger or better model. Then again, check out the hardware scene. Try as we might, we can’t think of a day that has gone by in our forums during which someone has not asked what the biggest and best thing available was, where they could get it, and how much for.

It’s this vicious cycle in the hardware world. You buy something that is the top of the line for a hefty chunk of change, only to have something better, often times MUCH better come out just two or three months later. And, despite what we would like to think, there are plenty of those among us that take the bait time and time again. Why in the world of hardware do people more commonly go for the top of the line products than in most other market sectors? Perhaps it is the (relatively) inexpensive nature of computer parts. Perhaps it is because the high-end market, at its core, is driven by gamers who are always searching for the bleeding edge.

Whatever the reason, it happens, and it happens a lot. A few months ago gamers were eating up a top of the line video card called the GeForce 7950GX2. Produced by one of the staple names in the gaming scene, NVIDIA, the card, or cards as it were, boasted not one but TWO GPUs that offered the very best performance money could buy. Sure there were less expensive solutions out there that could muster performance in the same ballpark, but there can only be one “absolute best”, and the 7950GX2 was it. After reaching into their pockets and coming up considerably short of the $600 required to own one of these behemoths, gamers across the world ended up falling for one of the less expensive options, they had little choice. Priced at right around $300, NVIDIA’s GeForce 7900GT offered far more than half the performance of the 7950GX2 at half the price. What a great deal. Well, WE jumped on it at least.

So it is with heavy hearts that we announce to you today that there is a new monster out there: a video card that, without breaking a sweat, outperforms our trusty 7900GT by a factor of two. It is extremely rare in the hardware world that we see a product released that can ravage its predecessor two times over. As luck would have it however, it has happened twice this year. NVIDIA’s new GeForce 8800GTX, the incarnation of that “G80” core we have been hearing so much about, is that new card. And today, we take it for a spin.