Nvidia's 8800 series, managed to make a big impact, being the first DirectX 10 compliant graphics card ever sold on the market. The top model, the 8800GTX, is the current flagship of Nvidia with a massive 768MB of memory on board and of course a top price. This graphics card promises superb performance with all current and next generation games. At almost double the price of an 8800GTS 320MB, we were curious to see how much faster this "monster" is, and if users can really benefit from such a high priced graphics card.

- Gainward BLISS 8800GTX 768 TV DD

The BLISS 8800GTX 768 TV DD from Gainward, is powered by NVIDIA´s® GeForce™ 8800GTX GPU integrating 768MB/384bits High-Speed DD3 memory, offering a mind blowing experience for all 3D enthusiasts who think they have seen it all. Never before have 3D rendering experiences appeared as life-like as with the next generation GPU architecture from NVIDIA®. Vivid ultra realistic rendering of 3D projects and environments in the highest resolutions without suffering any loss of it´s kick-ass performance, makes BLISS8800GTX from Gainward the only choice for hardcore gamers. Reference clock settings for the BLISS8800GTX is a core clock of 575MHz and a memory clock of 1800Mhz, though these already impressive settings have been pushed to an incredible 620+MHz on the core and 1900+MHz on the memory and has more to give under the right circumstances! This card will rock your world and forever change your view of 3D graphics.

The GeForce® 8800GTX graphics processing unit (GPU) delivers such a vast amount of performance that none of the available processors (CPU´s) on the market are able to keep up with it; thus guaranteeing an extraordinary performance today and tomorrow for future applications and operating systems like Microsoft Windows Vista.

Comparing the 8800GTX with the 8800GTS, we have several interesting findings:

The fastest Gainward 8800GTX card you can buy, comes with 575MHz/1.80GHz clock speeds. For our tests, Gainward provided the "8262-BLISS 8800GTX" model. The card can be found online at the retail price of €520. The retail box follows the usual design for Gainward graphics cards:

To sum it up, the retail package includes:

• A 8800GTX card
• A printed start manual (available in English/French/German/Italian)
• 2x DVI-D to VGA converters
• 2x power to PCI-E cables
• A TV-out cable (HDTV support)
• 1x Software CD with drivers
• Retail version of CyberLink PowerProducer and PowerDVD 6

Looking at the card, it is a full sized card, meaning you will need an plenty of room to fit it in your case. The card takes up two backplane slots, the second being for the heat exhaust which blows air out the back of the case. The cooling system covers both the memory modules and GPU core, and in most cases is very quiet:

At the top, we can see two SLI connectors for using with other 8800GTX cards:

The card has two DVI-D and one HDTV outputs:

In order to power up this little "monster", you need at least a 600Watt PSU with two PCI-E lines.

Here, you can see how much the 8800GTX card exceeds the size of a typical ATX motherboard. Be careful before buying!

On the back of the card, we see the sticker with the full model name, Part and Serial numbers: