Final Thoughts and Conclusions
We have gone through this whole review without mentioning the one and only problem we had with the 8800GT. The fan gets disgustingly loud when you really load the card heavily. You will notice this vast noise emanating from your computer when you first plug in your 8800GT and every time you start your PC once it is installed. When motherboard voltage regulation takes over, chances are pretty good there is another fan in your system that overshadows the fan on the card. In fact, the card is dreadfully silent under normal conditions. In fact, only once or twice during our three-day marathon of testing did we notice the 8800GT fan ramp up to its full deafening speed. This may or may not be a con depending on who you are and how you look at it, but it definitely made an impression on us so we thought it was worth mentioning. One other oddity we noticed with the card, though certainly not something that should be considered a “con” by anyone, was the presence of a white border around the normal black boot sequence frames. The border is about 20px wide and goes all around the monitor during the boot sequences, and remained present until Vista actually loaded to the UI level. Again, not something we look at negatively, but curious nonetheless.

We very briefly mentioned overclocking with this card. In our very brief ventures into nTune, never a pleasant experience, we got a pretty good taste of how this card benefits from the die shrink to 65nm. Headroom on this card seems to be pretty impressive. We had the card running at 720/1000 (core/mem, MHz), and running benchmarks just fine at 690/950. While we didn’t record the 3DMark06 scores achieved, we have to suspect that the 8800GT surpasses the GTX and begins to encroach on 8800Ultra territory at these speeds. Words simply cannot describe with appropriate grandeur how impressive a feat like from a $250 (USD) video card really is.

So our initial projection that the 8800GT, according to our interpretation of NVIDIA’s nomenclature, would fall somewhere between the 8800GTS and the 8600GTS turned out to be utterly wrong. The card wipes the floor with the 8800GTS 640MB, which retails at $350 (USD), or a full $100 above the MSRP of the new D8P based 8800GT. Not only does it trump the 8800GTS, the 8800GT comes excruciatingly close to the performance of the twice-as-expensive GeForce 8800GTX and even beats it in rare instances. It seems like the perfect card. Now less financially gifted individuals can get their hands on high-end graphics for a fraction (literally ½) the price of the previous entry fee. Since the card is hot off the press, it is reasonable to believe that drivers supporting it are at least partially immature (driver releases today are still improving the performance of the 8800 series cards launched a year ago) and consequently the performance of the 8800GT has a bit of room to grow. Using one of these cards becomes a viable option for a sub $1000 system (read: not DDR3 based) with a quad-core processor – a tag team that will certainly be making the rounds with system integrators and DYIers the world over.

We won’t be giving the 8800GT an official score just yet, as is our policy for brand new products that we are lucky enough to review in time for NDAs. That said, if we absolutely were forced at gunpoint to grant a quantitative summarization of this card, we find it pretty hard to give it anything less than like a 9.99. Why not a 10? We even used the word perfect a little earlier in the review. Well, we have to leave room. We have leave at least .01 because that dying if not dead ATI fanboy in us is still hanging on to the shred of hope that maybe, just maybe AMD’s RV670 can deliver a crushing blow to this new price/performance juggernaut. Likely? Hell no. Are we optimistic? Meh…anything can happen.