The first quarter of 2007 is bound to be a very eventful and interesting one for NVIDIA. For three months now NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series has had the pleasure of being the only DirectX 10 graphics hardware on the market. With ATI's previous generation X1950XTX as the only partially capable competitor to NVIDIA's new line of hardware, the GeForce 8 series hasn't faced any true next generation competition. This is all about to change, however. With the final release of AMD's ATI R600 GPU creeping closer and closer, NVIDIA is preparing for what we expect will be an AMD onslaught. The first move NVIDIA has made to counter the R600 GPU is to expand its DirectX 10 graphics product line.

So far, only two versions of the GeForce 8 series have been released; NVIDIA's flagship product, the GeForce 8800 GTX, and the slightly downscaled GeForce 8800 GTS. The pricing of these cards don’t fall into the price range of all consumers. Top of the line 8800 GTX video cards are priced around $550, and even the downscaled 8800 GTS will cost you around $400. In response to the impending launch of the R600, NVIDIA has begun gradually introducing new versions of the 8800 series.

Although it will be a while before NVIDIA has a complete lineup of video cards based on its new architecture with a video card for every market segment, today we will be looking at NVIDIA’s next version of the GeForce 8800 series, the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB.

The GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB comes at a perfect time for NVIDIA. DirectX 10 along with Windows Vista has been available since the end of January, and next generation game titles, although not released just yet, are right around the corner. More and more developers are starting to adopt DirectX 10 for their next generation games, and many PC gamers are looking for a path to upgrade their video cards to DirectX 10 hardware. This presents a large barrier for many of us who don’t have very large budgets.

This is where the GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB steps into the picture. The new part from NVIDIA has half the memory of the GeForce 8800 GTS, which was released in November. The 320 MB GTS, however, does not have any less memory chips than the 640 MB GTS. Instead, NVIDIA chose to reduce each memory chip’s density. Using this approach, NVIDIA has been able to maintain the 320bit memory bus-width of the 640 MB 8800 GTS. All other technical aspects of the card are identical to the GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB version; only the memory density of each memory chip has been reduced.

As is evident in the table, nothing other than the amount of memory chips has been changed in the move from the 640 MB GTS to the 320 MB GTS. This aspect alone will make this review very interesting since we will be able to directly see the effect memory density has on performance. Since there is such little difference between the 8800 GTS 640 MB and the 8800 GTS 320 MB, there is little need in completely reintroducing the architecture of the video card. If you would like to read a brief recap of the GeForce 8800 architecture, please refer to our previous article.

The Gainward Bliss 8800 GTS 320 MB sample that was sent to us for review had already been overclocked significantly by Gainward. The core had been overclocked to 550 MHz, only 15 MHz less than stock speeds. The 320 MB of memory had also been overclocked to 880 MHz, 1,760 MHz effective. The overclock is 160 MHz faster than the default 1,600 MHz memory speed of the reference board.

Gainward is not the only NVIDIA partner that has decided to ship factory overclocked 8800 GTS 320 MB video cards. In fact, many manufacturers have overclocked their video cards in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the competition.