8800 Ultra in late May

Dingleberry88 · 17 Apr 2007 at 10:24

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=562&Itemid=34

The G80 Ultra is just an overclocked version of the Geforce 8800 GTX. A few of our sources said that Nvidia plans to use faster memory as well, but the chip is the same 90 nanometre marchitecture.

Nvidia plains to launch this new chip in late May and it looks like they will launch it at the end of the month, after they realized how fast the R600XT hardware is.

The good thing is that a lot of birds will talk after Tunisia and Nvidia will have a clear picture of its competition. We highly doubt that R600XT will win every benchmark over Geforce 8800 GTX but it will certainly win some.

We expect that the chip will run around 700 MHz as this is the highest you can overclock the G80 GTX, but you never know.

Cartho · 17 Apr 2007 at 10:50

Nice
Mind you I am not really interested in new 8800 hardware now - this is just a stop gap, to slightly counter ATI's new lineup, and to plug the gaps until G90 is released

willhub · 17 Apr 2007 at 10:52

Cartho said:
Nice
Mind you I am not really interested in new 8800 hardware now - this is just a stop gap, to slightly counter ATI's new lineup, and to plug the gaps until G90 is released

The 8800Ultra will be a total rip off... some online sellers will be selling these for like £50 more than a GTX, for what? an Overclock everyone can do stable with there 8800GTX's

Darkwave · 17 Apr 2007 at 11:00

Let's not forget what The Inq. are telling us about the 8800U coming out in "tens of units."

Never thought I would quote The Inq. but since the main article in this thread is by that idiot then why not.

Tute · 17 Apr 2007 at 12:19

Ulfhedjinn said:
Let's not forget what The Inq. are telling us about the 8800U coming out in "tens of units."

Never thought I would quote The Inq. but since the main article in this thread is by that idiot then why not.

Depends. If this 8800 Ultra is going to be overclocked but near identical to the 8800GTX, I can see there being yield issues (especially if the overclock is high) and/or maybe heat issues.

Personally I think they should make the 8800U 65nm, and equip it with 1GB GDDR4. It would give it a nice boost, and allow much better yields and higher speeds with lower heat.

willhub · 17 Apr 2007 at 12:26

Tute said:
Depends. If this 8800 Ultra is going to be overclocked but near identical to the 8800GTX, I can see there being yield issues (especially if the overclock is high) and/or maybe heat issues.

Personally I think they should make the 8800U 65nm, and equip it with 1GB GDDR4. It would give it a nice boost, and allow much better yields and higher speeds with lower heat.

Maybe they will unlock those extra shader units that are supposed to be not used in the GTX?

chaparral · 17 Apr 2007 at 12:35

willhub said:
The 8800Ultra will be a total rip off... some online sellers will be selling these for like £50 more than a GTX, for what? an Overclock everyone can do stable with there 8800GTX's

I don't think that many 8800gtx cards can be overclocked to 700core and be stable...

I think you need to have a look at the 8800gtx overclocking thread on here..

willhub · 17 Apr 2007 at 12:38

chaparral said:
I don't think that many 8800gtx cards can be overclocked to 700core and be stable...

I think you need to have a look at the 8800gtx overclocking thread on here..

With decent cooling it must be seen as the Ultra is going to be the same core, same bored, only difference seems to be different cooler and higher clocks.

Cartho · 17 Apr 2007 at 14:13

Well there IS a water cooled GTX avaiable...
If they are making so few perhaps they ill just water cool it and therefore be able to overclock it to insane levels....

They aren't going to make radical changes like upping the VRAM or anything - that is what G90 will be for.
I fully expect G90 to be 65nm and to have 1GB of GDDR4...

Junk · 17 Apr 2007 at 14:38

personally i dont thing 1gb or vram makes sense. they are compensating in hardware for lazy software writers.

Cupra · 17 Apr 2007 at 14:42

Junk said:
personally i dont thing 1gb or vram makes sense. they are compensating in hardware for lazy software writers.

that made me lol but its true

also my ocz 8800gtx is overclocked to 692/2200 on the standard cooler

bru · 17 Apr 2007 at 15:04

just remember when Nv launched the 7800gtx and then later came in with the 7800gtx 512mb ....the much higher clocks were above what most people could get with thier 256mb cards if i remember corectly.

of course i now expect to see a welter of posts claiming ( i had my gtx at 18927465mhz so your wrong)..........

Cupra · 17 Apr 2007 at 19:09

its all about luck, patience ,setup and cooling some people would get a good clock.. some wont

Rroff · 17 Apr 2007 at 19:16

Junk said:
personally i dont thing 1gb or vram makes sense. they are compensating in hardware for lazy software writers.

uuuh... no amount of good programming (even with DXT compression) can allow you to pack a huge number of high res textures and skins into less than a certain amount of memory... with newer games coming out making increasing use of textures larger than 1024x1024 it makes perfect sense...

what doesn't make sense to me is adding faster memory as I don't know of a single GPU out there (with the exception of i.e. 5200 on 64bit or 7600GS on 128bit memory) where you can up the core clock fast enough to make the memory performance the bottleneck... infact with most modern high end GPUs you can drop the memory clock back by ~30% before you see any change in performance on stock core clock.

Dingleberry88 · 18 Apr 2007 at 12:58

A bit more info:

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=583&Itemid=34

Sources who live from these cards confirmed that Geforce 8800 Ultra will arrive in late May with a suggested retail price of $900.

They agreed with us that this is an insane price, but what can you do. Mr Fish and his sales team sets the price and they want your money. The card is an overclocked G80 core with some faster memory. We suspect GDDR4, but we could not confirm this at press time.

If this price turns out to be real, I predict that Nvidia will not sell a lot of them. We think that this is the point of the cards, as Nvidia won't have great yields at these super fast speeds. It might be the fastest card around but, ATI still hold its breath with the R600XTX. ATI's fastest XTX flavour won't arrive untill June, if not even later.

After reading this I've pretty much decided to go for a GTX.

Are Sparkle an OK brand? I can get one for £310.

Gibbo · 18 Apr 2007 at 13:26

Hi there

Information I have is the card will feature G80 core running at 700MHz.

Expect the card to have memory clocked in the region of 2200MHz.

The price is stupidly high and availability will be incredibly poor, we expect it not to sell so well as if you already have a GTX its a pointless upgrade.

Time will tell.

titaniumx3 · 18 Apr 2007 at 14:12

It would be cool if this was similiar to what we saw with the 7800GTX to the 7800GTX 512mb. I was pretty wowed when I first saw the performance difference between those two cards. It also happened to be the best looking card ever.

willhub · 18 Apr 2007 at 16:15

Gibbo said:
Hi there

Information I have is the card will feature G80 core running at 700MHz.

Expect the card to have memory clocked in the region of 2200MHz.

The price is stupidly high and availability will be incredibly poor, we expect it not to sell so well as if you already have a GTX its a pointless upgrade.

Time will tell.

$900 is a rip off beyond belief, worse price than charing £150 for an 8600GTS, getting decent cooling and overclocking a GTX to those clocks would be better. However if the 8800Ultra uses 1GB DDR4 ram and some other upgrades, it will be a different matter, but still not worth $900

jaykay · 18 Apr 2007 at 16:19

willhub said:
$900 is a rip off beyond belief, worse price than charing £150 for an 8600GTS, getting decent cooling and overclocking a GTX to those clocks would be better. However if the 8800Ultra uses 1GB DDR400 ram and some other upgrades, it will be a different matter, but still not worth $900

why 1gb of ddr400 ram
thats really slow and would perform bad for a graphics card

willhub · 18 Apr 2007 at 16:23

jaykay said:
why 1gb of ddr400 ram
thats really slow and would perform bad for a graphics card

Woops my bad, meant DDR4