NVIDIA 8800 Ultra and SLi
Nvidia is competing against itself and losing with the 8800 Ultra

On November 8th, 2006 NVIDIA launched a new GPU generation known as the GeForce 8 series. Specifically, the chip was known internally to NVIDIA as G80 but to you and me we know it as the GeForce 8800 GTX. When the GeForce 8800 GTX was introduced it had a suggested retail price of $599. You can currently find GeForce 8800 GTX cards online from $529 all the way up to $939 for an overclocked and water-cooled BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX.

As a quick refresh the GeForce 8800 GTX utilizes 128 stream processors and 768 MB of GDDR3 memory on a 384-bit memory bus. The core, which is the ROPs and everything else, runs at 575 MHz on the 8800 GTX; the stream processors run at 1.35 GHz. The memory runs at 900 MHz (1.8 GHz) which provides 86.4 GB/sec of memory bandwidth on the 8800 GTX.

The only performance difference with the new GeForce 8800 Ultra are higher core, stream processor and memory clock speeds explained below.

GeForce 8800 Ultra

The “GeForce Ultra” branding is back, and we are happy to see it once again. We have fond memories of highly clocked GeForce based Ultra cards over the years. The Ultra name has always been synonymous for just flat out fast performance and higher clock speeds. As such, that is exactly what the GeForce 8800 Ultra is, a faster GeForce 8800 GTX. The core architecture is exactly the same, 128 streaming processors and 768 MB of GDDR3 memory on a 384-bit bus.

While the architecture is the same, there are a couple of things NVIDIA has tweaked with this new GPU. The GPU itself is actually a newer refined revision compared to the GeForce 8800 GTX GPU, though still built on 90nm process. NVIDIA has done some tweaking internally, concerning timing tuning and other minor things to coax a little more performance but yet keeping the power utilization in check. In fact, according to the specifications the maximum load power draw has been reduced by a few watts compared to the 8800 GTX even running at the faster clock speeds.

Read all about it here, courtesy of enthusiast.hardocp.com

Eric