Review: ECS N8800GTX-768MX graphics card

The N8800GTX-768MX is based on Nvidia's fastest processor to date, the 8800GTX. Along with the 8800GTS, this GPU is the first to support DirectX 10, an upcoming standard for Vista that will improve the visuals in compliant games.

The graphics card ships in a huge box, with two DVI-I to VGA dongles and both S-video and composite video leads.

The card's core is clocked at 575MHz. While this isn't ground-breaking, the card has 128 unified pixel pipelines, which gives performance a huge boost. The 8800GTX can calculate upwards of 500GFlops (thousands of floating operations per second).

This is much higher than Nvidia's previous fastest single GPU, the 7900GTX, which can only calculate 250-300Gflops.

The card packs 768MB of GDDR3 Ram clocked at 1.8GHz and running on a 384bit bus. This gives it another moderate boost over the 7900GTX, which ticked along at 650MHz with 512MB of Ram running at 1.6MHz on a 256bit bus.

Using our old testing setup comprising a 3.73GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and 1GB Ram, the graphics card scored 9,795 in 3Dmark05.

With our updated benchmarking kit (an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard and 1GB Ram), scores increased by 68% in 3Dmark05 to 16,490.

The N8800GTX-768MX wasn't affected by turning on 4x AA (anti-aliasing) which smoothes edges in games.

This reflects the need for a high-end processor to accompany the graphics card. Without the latest CPU in your system the 8800GTX won't perform much better than older cards at low resolutions.

The card takes the honour of being the fastest single card we've tested; beating the 7950GX2 in all games at all resolutions.

In Half-Life 2, Doom3 and Unreal04 it pips 7900GTX Nvidia SLI setups by a small margin, but gets beaten by two Radeon X1950XTX's in Crossfire mode in most games, ranging from 0-17%.

To get this kind of performance the card requires more power than a PCI-Express slot can provide. You must therefore plug two 6-pin PCI-Express power plugs into the top of the card.

Two 6-pin PCI-Express splitters are provided for SLI setups, but in either case Nvidia recommends a 450W power supply and it must have 6-pin PCI-Express power cable outputs.

Furthermore, you might not be able to fit it into your PC since it's the longest card we've ever tested – at 27cm, it hung over the edge of our ATX motherboard.

Although it is the fastest card out there, £411 is a very high price to pay and you might be wise to wait for ATI to join the DirectX 10 party, which should force prices down.

UPDATE: ECS has now dropped the price to £370

ATI launches its R600 DirectX 10 card in March, but until then the ECS N8800GTX-768MX will remain among the fastest on the market, ideal for ultra high-resolution gamers.

For a wider range of scores achieved by this ECS graphics card, and to compare them with all other cards we've tested, see our benchmarking website.

Also consider:
Asus EN8800GTS
A high-end card for gaming enthusiasts and Vista users

Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro AGP
Give your AGP system a new lease of gaming life

Gigabyte GV-NX88S640H-RH
Plenty of power for your money with this high-end graphics card

All graphics card reviews

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