New and currently the fastest Nvidia graphics card, the Geforce 8800 Ultra has finally arrived. Gainward's card has a new cooler with a better design that makes the card appear larger than an 8800 GTX, but the PCB is the same size, 10.5 inch or 27 centimetres.

If you look closely at the card, the only thing that points out the origin of the card is the small sticker on the cooler, which states that this expensive card comes from Gainward. The full name of the card is a bit longer, Gainward BLISS 8800Ultra Geforce 8800Ultra, 768MB DDR3, Dual-DVI.



The card works at the reference 612 MHz for GPU and 2160 MHz for the memory. Another difference between this and the GTX is in the Shader clocks, GTX Shaders works at 1350MHz while the Ultra works a little faster, at 1500 MHz.

Higher clocks on GPU and memory should result in higher performance, up to 10-15%. There is 15% more memory bandwidth, which is now 101.3 GB/s compared to a GTX which has "only" 86 GB/s.

Today we have a short preview of the card for you, so that you can see that there is a boost in performance when compared to the last high-end card from Nvidia, the 8800 GTX.

We used:



Intel Core 2 Duo 6800 Extreme edition
Nforce 680i EVGA board
OCZ Reaper 1066MHz 5-5-5-15
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB SATA NCQ hard drive
Akasa EVO AK 922 Blue Athlon 64/X2/FX cooler and Intel CPU's
Silverstone DA750W modular PSU

You get about 6% improvement overall in the 3DMark06 score, where the 8800Ultra scored 11,889 marks. In Shader Model 3.0, the improvement is about 9% when compared to an 8800GTX card.

The score that we mentioned before was about 15% improvement and you can notice this at higher resolutions. In FEAR at 2,048x1,536, the Ultra scores 119 FPS while the GTX scores 15% less or 103 FPS.

To be continued.