Already during the short period of time we've had with NVIDIA's new flagship it's pretty clear that the G80 architecture is something above the rest. Alas, we haven't had the time to dig any deeper into this in this article, but we will do so in our full review of the card. Already we can make some conclusions from our GeForce 8800 GTX and that is that the bad rumors about unified shaders and poor DirectX 9.0 performance are far from true. Even if Windows Vista and DX10 should unlock new possibilities for G80 and coming DX10-capable architectures there is a lot to gain today already. The performance we've seen is nothing but impressive, but it comes at a price.

GeForce 8800 GTX has close to 700 million transistors and these transistors consume a lot of power and at the same generate heat. The power consumption is not as bad as some early reports indicated and much of this is because NVIDIA has settled for a relatively low clock frequency. They realized that there was enough performance anyway, because the G80 core can be pushed far beyond 575MHz. The cooler is very efficient and quiet, but also gets really hot, so despite its massive size it has a tough job to handle.

Other than that we can't make any bigger conclusions until we publish our full review where we will present a lot more information about the architecture, its performance and other interesting bits. Except from our review we will of course continue with even more extreme overclocking projects where G80 from now on is a given participant. Amongst others, NordicHardware will be at DreamHack Winter 2006 with both Intel's Core 2 Extreme XQ6700 processor and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI. The goal is of course to set new world records live at DreamHack and the ones doing it are of course Kinc and crotale, as usual. At least one thing is for certain, many new records will be set now that GeForce 8800 GTX has arrived.

GeForce 8800 GTX and its sibling, GeForce 8800 GTS will be available in stores today. The resistor value problems we've reported about earlier hasn't affected NVIDIA's hard launch, which means that the card will come as planned. The price of the flagship is not for the fainthearted though; $600-700. GeForce 8800 GTS, which we still haven't had the pleasure of meeting costs a little less; about $430-450. But as always, if you want to stay at the top fighting the best you have to pay up and right now there is no greater weapon that the GeForce 8800 GTX.