With the GeForce 8800 Series, NVIDIA has taken back the performance crown. Depending on the application and display settings you will see a performance increase of about 50% - 100% compared to the GeForce 7900 GTX. One single GeForce 8800 GTX can even beat a Crossfire X1900 setup in some benchmarks, at a much better performance/watt rating.
Even though this card is amazingly fast it is not loud. The fan is running almost inaudible most of the time. In high load situations the fan speed will increase for a short time sometimes catching your attention.
If this card is not fast enough for you, you can still overclock it a good deal. Our sample's GPU clock could be increased to 634 MHz (+10%), the memory ran stable up to 983 MHz (+9%). All with just the stock cooler. Several companies have announced waterblocks for the GeForce 8 Series.
All this sounds too good to be true. Where is the catch? First of all, the card does not come cheap. After the initial launch hype the price for the 8800 GTX is about $630, also many retailers are running low on stock and new shipments are not coming too soon. Another problem is that the drivers for Windows 2000/XP 32-bit are good. The drivers for 64-bit, Linux and Vista are rather unstable yet, as you can read on many forums. Another point to consider is that the card's DirectX 10 performance is yet unknown. Still, if you want to buy the fastest DirectX 9 card today (that it is for sure), go grab a GeForce 8800 GTX, and don't forget it runs best at 1600x1200 and up.