Thoughts, awards, where2buy, right2reply
I'm going take the liberty of being rather blunt in this conclusion. Retail GeForce 8800 GTX, I reckon, merely serves as a portentous technology showcase for 75% of our readers. Reseller pricing that's consistently north of £400 makes it justifiably unaffordable for the vast majority. I'm fortunate to run a Dell 30in panel as my main display but I can't justify the expense of GeForce 8800 GTX, no matter how good the tech., as I don't play enough games to warrant such an outlay. I'd hazard that's the kind of situation facing most folks that are reading these words. GeForce 8800 GTS brings down retail G80 ownership to around £350 but that's still way out of the purchasing zone for most.What the introduction of G80 does is provide the basis of understanding where the graphics hardware industry is going in the next few years, and I'm looking forward to the time when direct G80 derivatives hit mainstream pricing. As clichéd as it sounds, and I'm almost cringing as I type this, NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX really is 'tomorrow's technology available today'. The architecture is sound from virtually every viewpoint and I'm genuinely impressed that Jen-Hsun Huang and his team had the guts, primarily financially, to go down the unified shading route with G80. It's a big, bold, in-yer-face trumping of AMD/ATI's much-vaunted, and currently conspicuous by its absence, R600.
What does that mean for the Foxconn GeForce 8800 GTX FV-N88XMAD2-OD? The underlying architecture is good enough to offer as much futureproofing as any range-topping GPU has enjoyed of late. Game code is heading in the shader-heavy direction that'll keep G80 relevant way through 2007 and beyond, so if you've chosen now as the time to splash out £400+ on a graphics card, good for you.
On a more pragmatic note, Foxconn's effort is representative of the company's ethos for its range of retail PC hardware, that is, it sticks to the reference design, has a decent enough bundle, and will be available from a number of resellers. Our main concern for the Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-OD centres around the fact that GeForce 8800 GTX is all about technology leadership by the early adopters, so Foxconn's comparatively late entrance into the market with its retail implementation means that the card's target audience may well have already bought G80 on release day. Foxconn's predicted reseller pricing of £470 inc. VAT isn't the cheapest, either, and the late arrival of the card needed to be backed up by a lower street price, really.
In summary, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with Foxconn's card; it's just that the G80 customer boat seems to have sailed away into the distance on November 8th, and high-ish expected pricing isn't the lure that we'd hoped it might have been.
HEXUS Awards
The Foxconn GeForce 8800 GTX FV-N88XMAD2-OD is awarded the HEXUS Extreme Gaming Labs gong for being based on technology that is superior to anything else in its field. Foxconn's package, however, is decent enough but a little late and expensive to deserve an outright recommendation to buy.
Foxconn GeForce 8800 GTX FV-N88XMAD2-OD
