3DMark06 also shows us significant gains, with 20% separating the GTX and the Ultra XXX and we can see that the standard clocked model sits nicely in between the two.

TweakTown takes a look at the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX. This is not just any ordinary 8800 Ultra though, it is an XXX edition  - factory overclocked and at the highest end of the XFX range, which usually means top out of all the Nvidia partner brands. It does come with an RRP of around $1000 - $1100 USD in the United States. Wow, that's very expensive toy....

You cannot say that the new Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra is not a true performer let alone when you pair it up with the XFX brand and their factory overclocked XXX edition but this is coming at such a huge cost to the user. The other thing is though, it is not just the XFX price premium that we have seen for a while now - every brand has a huge price starting at around $1050 AUD in Australia or around $850 USD in the United States. Consider that the GeForce 8800GTX starts at $750 AUD and you have to really wonder how on earth does someone justify spending the extra cash.

Interested to know if we could push things even further, we again got nowhere with a XXX variant graphics card from XFX. While we did push the memory up 100MHz DDR, the core only went up 10MHz and this only resulted in our 3DMark score going from 13001 to 13070. The main thing to figure out now though is if the cheaper cards on the market will provide the ability to overclock as high like we have seen with the GeForce 8600GTS products - only time will tell and we are sure that we will find out in coming weeks.

The bottom line is quite simple - there really is no way you could justify the price increase of the new 8800 Ultra, let alone the XFX XXX edition, not at all and not in the slightest. If you have the money and you want the best of the best, the Bugatti Veyron of all graphics card, for sure buy it, but there is no way you could honestly say to someone that it was a wise purchase. The card is nothing more than a way of sticking it to AMD and ATI - in a marketing sense - in regards to their upcoming R600 launch later this month. Much like Intel seem to be trying their very hardest to destroy AMD, Nvidia is also giving it their best shot, too.

In other news, PC Stats posted nVidia GeForce 8800GTS 320MB SLI Videocard Head On Comparison, NVNews tested MSI NX8800GTS-T2D320E-HD OC card and finally Elite Bastards reviewed Sapphire Radeon X1950 PRO Dual video card.