From the Anandtech review... said:
Often, when reviewing hardware, it is difficult to draw a hard line and state with total confidence that our conclusions are the only logical ones that can be drawn from the facts. We try very hard to eliminate personal opinion from our reviews and provide readers with enough information to form their own educated opinions. We try to point out the downsides of the best products out there, as well as the niche uses for which otherwise disappointing hardware might shine. So often our job is about balance and temperance.
But not this time: The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra is an utter waste of money.
Let's review the facts. First, our performance data shows the 8800 Ultra to perform on par with our EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX KO ACS3. Certainly the 8800 Ultra nudges the EVGA part out of the lead, but the performance difference is minimal at best. The price difference, however, is huge. We can easily find the EVGA card for its retail price of $650, while NVIDIA expects us to pay $180 more for what amounts to a repositioned cooling fan and updated silicon.
Add to that the fact that we've tested over a dozen 8800 GTX parts since their launch last year, and every single card we've tested has reached higher core clock speeds than the 8800 Ultra. We know that increasing core clock speed using nTune causes shader clock speed to increase as well. Setting an 8800 GTX core clock to 621 would give us a shader clock of ~1450MHz, coming close to the 8800 Ultra level. The extra 50MHz increase in shader clock speed won't have a very large impact on performance as we have seen in our clock scaling tests.
