ECS makes a killer graphics card, just like everyone else

WE'VE OFTEN WONDERED what the point of owning a supercar is if you live in a city like London, to have spent all that money and have all that power at your fingertips and not be able to utilise it must be very frustrating. But maybe, along with the status involved, the knowledge of what it is capable of and the occasional instance where you do get to fully unleash the power stored up in that beast makes it all worthwhile.

Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX chipset falls into the much the same sort of bracket, at least for now. It's very, very expensive and for the most part you'll barely tap the potential stored inside this graphics monster, but when you do you'll know exactly where all that money went.

All boxed up

In this particular instance we're reviewing the ECS N8800GTX-768MX, the flagship 8800 chipset card from Elitegroup Computer Systems and according to our tests performs superbly well, even when compared to the other 8800 GTX cards out there. Everything about this card is somewhat over the top, bordering on the ludicrous Texan philosophy that bigger is automatically better. The box is gigantic, the card is absurdly long and the cooler is similarly large. It requires no less than four power standard connectors to power it, or two six pin molex connectors if your power supply has them. I'm pretty sure that if you had two of these connected in SLI the lights would dim when you fired them up. That said a 600W PSU ran the card and everything else in our test rig without a hitch.

In the box

In the insanely large box you get a lot of fresh air and cardboard along with your video card, power adaptors, two DVI to analogue dongles, video cables and manual and software CD. This offering doesn't come with much in the way of frills and hopefully this will be reflected in the final price tag, which is very similar to its competitors out there. To get technical for a second the GTX version sports 768MB GDDR3 memory that interfaces with the GPU on a 384-bit memory bus, with an operating core of 575MHz and memory clock timings of 1.8GHz.

Installation was fairly straightforward except that, even though the case we stuck it into was pretty spacious, it took a little manoeuvring to get into place and get hooked up with enough power. As you can see from the pictures here is was a tight squeeze. We recommend you make sure that you have nothing covering the back of your motherboard as it means you probably won't be able to get this card in if you do. If you're thinking about setting up two fo these in SLI then we advise thinking vary carefully about the case you put them in.

Installing the card was tricky

This is a first Inqpression, so we're not going to bombard with benchmarks and graphs but as mentioned earlier this card is reminiscent of a high performance sports car, while you're surfing the net, writing emails or watching DVD's you probably won't even touch on a tenth of what the G80 chipset can do, it's like going through rush hour in a Porsche. Even when you get out on the highway and start putting your foot down with some of the latest games there is only so hard you can push this card with today's technology.

We were able to crank up every game and every benchmark to its maximum settings and watched as it still ran smoothly. At a resolution of 16600x1200 and with every setting maxed out 3DMark gave us a score of about 10000 3DMarks, Half-life 2 came out over 110fps and Doom 3 was benched at around 120fps. Bear in mind that after about 50fps it starts to get really difficult for our puny squishy human eyes to tell any kind of difference you can start to see the earlier point about untapped potential. Of course the car analogy breaks down at a point because, inlike speed limits, the demand on the graphics cards will increase, games will get more intensive and once DirectX 10 comes around and there are games and other applications that utilise it these cards will be taxed, but for now it seems that there is nothing out there that makes us feel like this card is being pushed.

In Short
The ECS N8800GTX-768MX is certainly an impressive graphics card, it's got power in spades and the performance is remarkable. Unfortunately we didn't really find anything that separates it from the competition and the fact that it feels underutilised means that we're reluctant to recommend it to anyone unless you absolutely have to get a new graphics card right now and you have the money to burn. With a few other variations on this chipset due out soon and ATI's R600 chipset on the horizon we would recommend holding out until there is more choice and the prices have come down a bit. By that time there should also be a few more games that can help you feel like you're getting something for money. ?

The Good
Impressive performance
Did we mention the impressive performance?

The Bad
Very large
Very expensive

The Ugly
Nothing that really differentiates this card from others in the same class

Bartender's Report