With the launch of their 8800GT today, nVidia is chalking up quite a few firsts. Its their first high-end GPU produced using 65nm technology which also allows them to use a single slot cooling solution. This is also their first card based on PCI Express 2.0 specification. In fact, its the first ever video card that has reached our labs thats PCI-E 2.0 compliant. Lastly, this is also their only 512MB based card in the 8800 series- GTS had 320 or 640MB while the GTX and Ultra were outfitted with 768MB. Lets take a look at how the 8800GT compares to the other 8800 series cards as far as specification are concerned:

Looking at the specifications above, the 8800GT has faster core speed than the GTX and the GTS while the memory speed remains the same as GTX and faster than GTS. It also has Stream, Pixel and Vertex Processors that are more than the GTS but lower than the GTX. With lesser processors and higher clock speeds than the GTX, the results posted by the 8800GT should be interesting. We recieved a sample from MSI today morning and decided to take it out for a quick spin.

The packaging of the MSI 8800GT is like all other MSI VGA cards we've tested of late. It comes with a user guide as well as a quickstart guide along with a drivers CD, a DVI-DSUB converter, a power connector and a dongle with component and S-Video outputs.

The single slot solution and the miniscule fan certainly allow the 8800GT to be a lot more flexible as far and installation and cooling are concerned. You should easily be able to add one in your HTPC/XPC type of chassis.

The card is smaller than the 8800GTX is size and the same as the 8800GTS. One thing we noticed was that with the 8800GT, the SLI connector is a bit lower than previous nVidia cards.