NVIDIA WILL UNLEASH the 8800 Ultra to the world on May 2nd at 6AM PST - 15:00 CET, but atypically for Nvidia, this will be a paper launch.
Yes, you've read it correctly, this will not be a hard one, but rather launch results of benchmarks and announce availability for the third week of May.
This time, Graphzilla decided not to trust any of its partners and just decided that the partners will receive the board after the NDA expiry date, to stop renegade websites from filing reviews of leaked hardware. The partners we have talked with are sincerely disappointed at Nvidia and consider this a breach of trust.
Also, what makes things very worrying in the Nvidia-partner relationship is the fact that some companies are more preferred than others, and there is a certain memory company that is raising quite a few eyebrows.
You see, in order to be able to buy 8800GTX, a lot of partners have to buy up to 8-9-10-11 GPUs of a lower grade - that is the 7300, 7600 and now 8300, 8400, 8500, 8600 - while some partners are allowed to get just the highest end cards.
We are not sure how the situation will resolve with 8800 Ultra, but the final specs we have learned and are present on the boards given to reviewers, only and exclusively by Nvidia, are rather disappointing.
The GPU is not clocked to 675MHz, as some official documents from the past were stating, but rather a very conservative 612MHz, a 37MHz clock boost. The clock of 128 scalar units has been raised from 1.35GHz to 1.50 and memory is set at 2.16GHz instead of 1.80GHz, raising the memory bandwidth from 86.4GB/s to 103.68GB/s, still a couple of gigabytes short of upcoming Radeon HD 2900XT, with its 105.60GB/s.
Everything else remains the same as it was on the 8800GTX, and some partners suggest schematics how to create an 8800Ultra from a single 8800GTX board - an interesting turn of events indeed. Can you say... voltmod?
Yes, you have read this correctly - in order to create an 8800Ultra, you would have to search the search engines of today for schematics of 8800GTX and raise the voltage of the memory by two 0.05V notches, and the clock of 2.13GHz should be achieveable by almost every 8800GTX board out there.
