Interestingly enough, this GPU was released right before the ATI R600 launch back in May and is essentially an overclocked 8800GTX with an updated cooler. While this may seem on the outset as no big deal, it’s a huge deal to NVIDIA’s performance capital to show gamers and its shareholders that it is maintaining leadership from its competition.

Keep in mind the 8800 GTX GPU has the most shader units, fastest clock and highest available memory – it doesn’t take much coxing to get even better performance from it in the presence of extra cooling. XFX’s “Extreme” version of this Ultra card is clocked at a whopping 675MHz for the shader clock and 2.3GHz on the 768MB of on-board RAM. There are other versions of this card from XFX which have slightly slower clock rates and carry the “Ultra” and “Ultra Extreme” monikers.

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