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Product Number: 512-P3-N802-A1
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Warranty: Lifetime
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Intro

For the last two months there has been buzz in the industry and across the internet that both Nvidia and ATI were going to be releasing new cards in November. Both of these companies are trying extremely hard to target the lucrative market of consumers who are looking for great 3D performance at a sub-$300 price point. ATI launched the opening salvo with their HD2900Pro but supply shortages of this limited edition card dampened people’s enthusiasm towards it. Nvidia has now come into the fight with all guns blazing; today marks the official launch of their 8800GT 512MB and 256MB cards.

Many of us thought that Nvidia would release a minor refresh to one of their existing series in order to offer a good price to performance ratio. What we didn’t expect was an entirely new card and that is exactly what Nvidia has done with the 8800GT. Unfortunately, we hear that supply will be a bit tight within the first two weeks following the launch and initially only the 512MB version of the cards will be available with the 256MB version coming to us in mid to late November. One way or another, at a price of around $270CAD for a non-overclocked version of this card, the 8800GT has the potential to take the graphics world by storm if its specs can translate into real-world performance. Once again, this will be a hard launch since we know for a fact that quite a few Canadian retailers have already received stock (albeit limited for the first little while) and should be selling the card as you read this.

To give you an idea of how strained things are with supply, it was looking like we would not get one of these cards in time to release any kind of review. Then a mere three days ago we heard one of them was coming our way. Our review unit finally arrived…less than 48 hours before this review goes live. Unfortunately, after a mere 4 hours of sleep in the last two days there were still some things that have not been included here such as overclocking and some final game benchmarks. Expect full overclocking details as well as benchmarks for Stalker, Quake Wars: Enemy Territory, R6:LV and Bioshock in our forum thread over the next few weeks.

Check here regularly for updates: Comment and Update Thread for EVGA 8800GT Review

Updates in thread linked above:

- Overclocking
- Overclocked benchmarks (incl. Crysis DX10)

Anyways, on to our review!!