Concluding any hardware review is usually a case of pointing out all of the major pros and cons of the part that has just been tested. However, it has to be said - Finding much in the way of cons with the GeForce 8800 GTX is a tricky business.
Although we won't have the full story on G80 until Windows Vista and DirectX 10 game titles and benchmarks to go with it ship, as of right now the architecture which powers it looking like not far short of a masterpiece. Unified shaders, plenty of memory bandwidth, supreme real-world and synthetic performance, and perhaps most importantly stupendous image quality courtesy of improvements to both anti-aliasing and texture filtering abilities. If you'd sat a bunch of graphics hardware geeks in a room for a couple of hours to decide upon and note down what they wanted to see from a DirectX 10 architecture, what they'd describe would almost certainly be very close to what we have here with G80.
Of course, the trouble with masterpieces is that they're expensive, and the GeForce 8800 GTX is no different in this regard, bringing a new high with regard to price points as well as performance. Thankfully, Foxconn have taken a little of the sting out of this new flagship part, with a recommended retail price hovering around the £400 mark, which should make one of the cheapest GeForce 8800 GTX boards on the market. Given the fact that all current boards use the same reference PCB, cooler and clocks, there's little reason (short of a particularly exciting bundle) not to go for the cheapest deal you can find if you've set your heart on this particular SKU.
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