Every now and then the ferocious competition in the hardware world produces a product that is completely groundbreaking. Just as often, however, it produces a product that leaves the vast majority scratching their heads. Companies think up new and imaginative SKUs to existing products that offer a little something more than their predecessors. Intel Corp used to be the biggest perpetrator of this mind-boggling exercise. One cannot count the number of Pentium-D SKU's that came to the market since their introduction up until the launch of the Core 2 family.

Intel is certainly not the only one that does it though. Video card companies do it quite often as well. Although they are certainly getting a bit better than they have been in the past, it is likely that a search of any particular video card will yield three or four results of differing specs and perhaps different names entirely. Granted, these derivatives are not all a result of NVIDIA or ATI's own prerogative, graphics board partners tend to tweak reference cards to varying degrees and market them with their own monikers as well. Today, however, we will be looking at the most recent SKU variation from NVIDIA itself, the mighty GeForce 8800Ultra.

With what is expected to be a huge launch in the graphics market from AMD/ATI just around the corner, it seems NVIDIA was just itching to play the trump card and beat the R600 to shelves. As far as we know, this 8800Ultra is the end-all graphics board from NVIDIA until the G90-based cards are brought to market. We really don't know exactly why or even if NVIDIA was determined to put out this "G80's Last Stand", considering their current G80 product line has been enjoying what is essentially free-reign over the high-end graphics market for about 5 months now. In any case, the 8800Ultra is here, and we intend to show you just what it can do.

The Card
Glancing at the pictures, the first thing you will notice about the 8800Ultra is the updated cooler design. As opposed to the rather non-impressive dual-slot cooler on the current 8800GTX and 8800GTS series cards, NVIDIA has chosen to go with a more aggressive and extended cooler on the 8800Ultra. The black part you see is some sort of plastic polymer, not the matte black metal we were hoping for. Besides the cooler, however, the card appears to be physically identical the 8800GTX. In fact, we have received reports from NVIDIA officials that the biggest difference between the 8800Ultra and the 8800GTX is software based.

 

 

There really is not much else to say about this card, as everything that needs to be said about the features and specifications has already been mention in our initial review of the 8800GTX.