Cheaper 8800GTS ready to ship

THE TIME FOR AFFORDABLE DirectX 10 boards is approaching sooner than most people expected.

In a run-up to the launch of AMD's Radeon X2800 series and GeForce 8600, Nvidia has prepared a bridge between upcoming mainstream 8600 for $199 and high-end 8800GTS cards for $449. The bridge's name is 8800GTS 320MB.

Graphzilla just slapped ten 32MB chips instead of current 64MB ones and cut the price by $150 dollars to an affordable $299. The card doesn't otherwise change, we're still talking about G80 GPU working at 500MHz with 96 scalar shaders clocked at 1.2GHz. Memory clock also remained the same, 800MHz DDR (1.6GHz) yields 64GB/s of bandwidth.

Given the fact that nothing else has changed, you can now calculate the price of components on 8800GTS graphics card: 640MB of fastest GDDR3 memory make out for 55% of a price of the card, PCB also isn't cheap, cooling solution costs 10% and the GPU makes only 20% of the price.

And the G80 graphics chip is the most advanced piece in the microprocessing industry. Its complexity makes the Athlon 64, Core 2 or even Sony's Cell look like little kids in a kindergarten. µ