Introduction
NVIDIA's pre-emptive strike against the AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT was the GeForce 8800 Ultra, a graphics-card design that built on the best bits that the 8800 GTX provides - G80 and lots of fast memory most of all - and turned the screws a bit, bumping clocks up decently and applying a new cooler to take care of any issues that arise as a result.
It's the current top-dog in consumer graphics cards, delivering more performance at good levels of IQ than anything that's ever gone before. That's the nature of progress in the graphics market and no less than consumers expect.
GPUs completely obliterate Moore's Law in terms of performance for any given transistor budget and that fast pace is almost what defines the PC these days in terms of the performance march.
Arguably NVIDIA didn't need GeForce 8800 Ultra at all. The Radeon HD 2900 XT didn't even answer the performance question posed by GeForce 8800 GTS, never mind GTX, with the latter still sitting pretty at the top in terms of outright grunt even after HD 2900 XT hit the ground.
So what would NVIDIA's partners do with 8800 Ultra when faced with that reality, where it really doesn't need to exist or be that fast? Why, they'd overclock it of course!
eVGA is a long-standing provider of go-faster NVIDIA graphics products, so wasn't ever going to leave the 8800 Ultra alone. Performance has been increased with clock adjusts, justifying - so the company hopes - the Superclocked moniker. What we're looking at today is the eVGA 8800 Ultra KO - eVGA's turbocharged 768MB Ultra - comparing it to the standard Ultra hardware and other products in the high-end graphics food-chain.
Will the eVGA e-GeForce 8800 Ultra Superclocked do good things or will the £540 asking price be simply too much for the performance on the table? Let's find out.
