Product Reviews

Nvidia's GeForce 8800 range is fast, but cards that use the graphics chip tend to be pricy. ECS's N8800GTS-320MX is a little cheaper, with half the memory of the standard GeForce 8800GTS. Still, 320MB of GDDR3 memory running at 800MHz (1.6GHz effective) is not a piddling amount.

This reduction in memory is the only change over other cards in the range. The N8800GTS-320MX has the same

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96-stream processors running at 1.2GHz and 500MHz core speed as a 640MB 8800GTS. It's a very powerful card that performed only a touch slower than a 640MB 8800GTS. Call of Duty 2 proved to be an anomaly, however, as Nvidia's current drivers don't support Call of Duty 2's anti-aliasing setting under Windows Vista. Enabling 4x anti-aliasing through Nvidia's software gave us the poor result here. It indicates that this card might have problems with older games if you run Vista.

Apart from this, its performance was impressive. The N8800GTS-320MX can handle games at high resolutions; Prey ran at a fast frame rate of 46.7fps at 1,600x1,200. The card is compatible with DirectX 10, so you can play newer games when they're released.

The N8800GTS-320MX is a very fast, powerful graphics card. It'll happily play today's games and is ready for next-generation DirectX 10 games, too. Driver support under Windows Vista isn't perfect yet, but this is no problem for new games.