Thoughts, HEXUS.awards, where2buy, right2reply
Generally speaking, once you've seen one GeForce 8800 GTX you have seen them all, especially if the partners in question haven't made a concerted attempt to differentiate themselves from the homogeneous crowd, at least as far as default clock speeds are concerned.
With that in mind and thinking of the ECS N8800GTX-768MX first, we see that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the technology; the GeForce 8800 GTX is the finest graphics card around, but the combination of a bone-stock card, meagre bundle and average warranty are further compromised by current unavailability - which is scheduled for next week. Its saving grace is the reasonable street price of around £375, including VAT, which is in line with other AICs' retail models.
Our thinking is similar for the OCZ effort. We can identify the same shortcomings in its bundle and price, and its overclocking performance, for our sample at least, isn't particularly stellar. The better-than-average warranty is what keeps it in the running, though.
OCZ may well be on a mission to have its name in at least half your PC by powering this card with an OCZ PSU and the system by OCZ RAM. The overall package, we feel, needs to be improved if that's going to be the case.
The question we ask ourselves is what compelling reasons might a prospective buyer have of choosing these G80 offerings over, say, established graphics-card brands such as ASUS or XFX, especially with their cards priced at £375 or so, including free shipping at Scan for registered HEXUS readers? Other than OCZ's warranty, we're short on answers to this, frankly, and that's why we cannot wholly recommend either the ECS or OCZ cards when evaluated against their peers. It's not good enough that they're decent cards, which they are: as new entrants they need to be better than the established players.
We love the underlying technology and any card based on G80 will always perform well, now and in the future. However, neither the ECS or OCZ efforts better the overall proposition offered by the likes of the widely available ASUS and XFX SKUs. The market becomes more and more competitive as newer entrants arrive: that just makes their job to be #1 increasingly more difficult.
HEXUS.certification
Both cards are awarded the HEXUS Labs certification for passing our tests without failure. This is not a recommendation to buy, however.
ECS N8800GTX-768MX
OCZ GeForce 8800 GTX
