Verdict: The fastest graphics card in the world... for the time being.
After a few recent notable DirectX 10 releases - namely BioShock and World in Conflict - the CPC crew were absently pondering whether there's any hardware that can run these games at their prettiest. This means high frame rates, high resolutions and maximum detail settings. The obvious choice of graphics card to power such games is the Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra but, as ever, we wanted more power. Enter EVGA with its Superclocked version.
The GeForce 8800 Ultra originally cost £410, with pre-overclocked versions such as this card commanding a hefty premium over that massive price. The five months since its launch have done little to dent the Ultra's impact on your wallet.
The EVGA has faster clock speeds than a reference Ultra, thanks to 'Superclocking'. We hope that this involves more than just overclocking it - some lasers or Mutant-X radiation should be involved - but the results are the same. The core speed has been ramped up from 612MHz to 655MHz, and the 768MB GDDR4 memory has been tweaked from 1,080MHz to 1,124MHz (2,248MHz, effective). More significantly, the Ultra's 128 stream processors have also been overclocked from 1,500MHz to 1,660MHz. This is hard to do yourself (no overclocking tool can touch the stream processors yet, although there are rumours of a new version of RivaTuner that can do this), and should provide the biggest speed boost of all EVGA's tweaks. After all, it's the stream processors that do most of the work.
As if the regular 8800 Ultra wasn't large enough, EVGA has added a passive cooling plate to the rear. This slightly increases the Ultra's weight, as well as its chunkiness. You should consider buying this card only if you have a large, well-ventilated PC case. You'll also need a PSU in the region of 600W or more (depending on your other components) with two 6-pin PCI-E graphics card power plugs (or at least enough Molex plugs to use an adaptor).
After shelling out almost 500 notes and fitting this monolithic beast of a graphics card in your case, you'd expect to use nothing less than maximum detail settings in games. In BioShock, the card easily handled full detail settings at the massive resolution of 1,920 x 1,200, even with DirectX 10 effects enabled. It may be an Xbox 360 game based on the Unreal 3 engine, but the Superclocked Ultra can handle it without quivering. Similarly, World in Conflict's built-in benchmark returned impressive scores of XXfps minimum and XXfps average.
Our three standard test games also returned impressive results. F.E.A.R. is starting to show its age compared with newer titles such as BioShock, but it still gives any graphics card a tough workout. Frame rates never dropped below 42fps at our maximum test settings, though, which is a suitably boastworthy result. The card ran S.T.A.L.K.E.R. just as easily, returning a silky-smooth minimum frame rate of 49fps at 1,920 x 1,200.
This may be a Superclocked version of the fastest graphics card on Earth, but that doesn't mean you can't tweak the settings a little more. The core was happy to overclock to a thumping 690MHz, while the RAM also went a smidgen higher to 1,290MHz. This provided another few frames per second in F.E.A.R., but given that this card canes all modern games at 1,920 x 1,200, it's hardly worth the effort.
Conclusion
However, any excitement over the awesome performance of the EVGA 8800 Ultra Superclocked should be tempered a bit. Yes, it can play the latest titles at massive resolutions in all their DirectX 10 glory. And that's not easy - we were expecting the card to struggle. However, we can't recommend you buy this card, as we have had strong indications from sources in the graphics industry that Nvidia will have new cards in early November. This next generation will either induce massive price cuts in the 8-series, offer greater performance for less money than comparable 8-series cards, or it will be the worst range of products Nvidia has released since the GeForce FX. We can't see the latter happening, as Nvidia is good at learning from its mistakes, so while it's interesting to see that current hardware can run DirectX 10 games properly, you're better off waiting, or buying a lesser card if you can't wait.
