MSI sent us their fastest card for testing- the GeForce 8800 ULTRA with overclocked speeds. Easily, the scores posted in most games by this card are the fastest we’ve seen in our labs for an out-of the-box product. Playing with it feels like having a pair of Gatling guns at your disposal. Lets look at the specifications posted by MSI

• Core speed : 612MHz (Overclocked to 650MHz)
  
• Memory speed :2160MHz
• Graphics Bus Technology: PCI Express
• Memory Amount: 768MB DDR3
• Memory Interface: 384-bit
• Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 103.7
• Fill Rate (Billion pixels/sec): 39.2
• RAMDACs (MHz): 400

A big box houses all the cables and components present with the card. MSI writes all the features and specifications on both sides of the box.

Inside the Box we found two DSUB- DVI converter s, a user manuals, MSI Drivers CD, two power cables, 1x video cable, 1x HDTV/ video cable and Company of Heroes Full game from MSI.

The Ultra has the same size as the 8800GTX which by itself is the largest single GPU graphics card we’ve seen. The fan is relocated on the Ultra with an nVidia logo around it which certainly looks cool. Underneath the fan, nVidia uses a new GPU which is clocked higher than the stock 8800GTX- more on this a bit later.

Like the 8800GTX, the Ultra uses features two SLI Connectors connect to another 8800 Ultra Card. The face of the card has two Dual-Link DVI connectors as well as the Video Output connector. MSI adds yellow caps on the DVI outputs to protect it from damage.

We removed the top black plastic cover from the heatsink to see the cooling function and then the complete heatsink to reach the GPU.

After cleaning the thermal paste, you can see the Ultra GPU is modeled as G80-450-A3. Even the RAM chips used on the Ultra (Samsung BJ08) are faster- running at 0.8ns compared to the GTX’s 1ns. The last picture is of the chip that is responsible for the Shader speed.