The chaps over at TweakTown take a further look at the XFX GeForce 8800GTS 320MB XXX (Factory Overclocked). Here's a bit:

Factory pre-overclocked graphics cards aren't for everyone due to the extra price that they carry and the fact that it isn't difficult to overclock if you happen to find the magic card that overclocks through the roof. With that said though, there are a large amount of people who don't feel comfortable overclocking cards and the extra costs that comes with a pre-overclocked model is then well worth it. It's clear here that the overclock that XFX offer on the XXX version of the card is perfect and offers a very nice bump in performance when compared to the stock clocked model sometimes almost around 20% quicker but usually around 11 - 14% which isn't bad at all considering the XXX edition is about 11% more expensive than the standard base model.

The package isn't too bad; it's nice to see a full version game with a card that is above the norm. While the game isn't as recent as we would like it really is a better offering then we see from a lot of other companies. Hopefully XFX choose to look at some of Tom Clancy's new releases though in the near future or teaming up with a game developer to bundle something like Crysis, Half Life 2 EP2 or UT2007 when they are released.

Overclocking was a bit of a surprise, it did go up a little higher than we expected but the gains that we saw didn't really show us much so the chances are you probably wouldn't really look at overclocking much more then stock if you end up buying this particular model. Overall the card puts a tick in a lot of the right boxes and it's really a model worth looking at, unfortunately the biggest problem with the card is the price. In Australia it is one of the most expensive graphics cards on the market and while it does offer the biggest overclock, we can see other cards that offer an overclock (while not quite as large) come in cheaper. The choice to also not include the PCI Express power connector is again disappointing and something XFX needs to fix pretty soon.

In related news, Hardware Secrets reviewed the new GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB from MSI, which is sold already overclocked too.

Compared to GeForce 7950 GT - which is a terrific card for the USD 250 range -, this GeForce 8800 GTS from MSI simply smoked it: MSI overclocked model was 11%-23% faster on 3DMark03, 75%-84% faster on 3DMark06, 25%-55% faster on Quake 4, 17%-46% faster on F.E.A.R., 16%-34% faster on Far Cry (with no image quality settings enabled, see below) and 40%-50% faster on Battlefield 2142.