I arrived Monday morning and there was Fata1ty staring at me… I though, “John Wendel, don’t you even knock anymore.”

I’m glad he doesn’t. This is the most insane 8800 GTS ever released. I can’t imagine anyone trying to compete with it. It challenges the likes of its big brother, the 8800 GTX and even beats it in a couple of the benchmarks.

This is huge news as the Fatal1ty card is about $200 less than the 8800 GTX. Did I hear somebody say graph?

Now, this was tested at 1280×1024 and as you can see the GTX does a little better without any filter turned on… but it’s 2007, we all turn the filters on these days. Jaggies are out. With AA and AF on the performance is almost identical…

Let me say that again, The performance of the 8800 GTS Fatal1ty is almost identical to the 8800 GTX XXX edition at 1280×1024 with AA and AF enabled.

Did somebody screamed for a graph with higher resolutions?

Here the tables turn a bit… The cards are about the same speed with the filters turned off and the 8800 GTX is faster with AA and AF.

The Fatal1ty card is overclocked by 150MHz (when compared to the stock 8800 GTS). This is a huge overclock for a graphics card. Now here is the strange part: it runs 11 degrees Celsius cooler than the 8800 GTX XXX!

Do you think there is any overhead to further overclock this thing? Heck yes. I’ve already seen it overclocked by 50MHz. This only raised the temperature by 3 degrees.

After a moderate overclock you will have a card that can outrun some of the $500 + cards on the market for under $350.

This is one of the best products that XFX has ever released. Stop reading this and buy it.

I’ll keep this short… The game play is incredibly smooth. I tested it with my Diamond Radeon HD 2900 XT with 1GB GDDR4. I get an even 60 fps at 1680×1050 (everything at max).

I am having a blast with the demo. I will post some more videos and scores after I install my physx card from Ageia. Here’s some footage of the two deathmatch levels:

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