The clock speed of the GPU is slightly higher than its box spec, as the GPU is running at 512Mhz (Default is 500Mhz) and its memory is running slightly under 800Mhz at 792mhz (1600Mhz).

The following list gives you the basic gist of things....

• Bus Connector: PCI-Express
• Outputs: 2xDVI-I DUAL LINK HDTV-OUT
• Core Clock: 500 MHz
• Memory Clock: 1600Mhz
• Memory Capacity: 320MB
• Memory Interface: 320-bit GDDR3
• Memory Bandwidth: 64GB/s
• Fill Rate (texels/sec.): 24 Billion
• TV-out: YES
• Cooling system: Fan
• DirectX: DX10

Inside the box it's like a ghost town, with little more than the card, a driver CD, a thin manual, DVI to analogue adaptor and a HDTV cable.

Performance wise the card was nearly identical to the overclocked MSI we reviewed a few weeks back, bearing in mind that our Test PC has only a 3.2GHz P4 you can see how this is affecting the scores when no anti-aliasing is applied, with three out of the five cards scoring the same mark in Quake 4.

For testing we used 3DMark 06 and HardwareOC Quake4/Prey benchmark software, though only the Quake4 test results are added to the gallery. As you can see once again the card comes into its own when AA and AF settings are applied, this was similar in the Prey test as it can score some pretty respectable scores - thus breathing a new lease of life into our Test PC.

In COH (Company of Heroes) we set the game to the max res that our LCD could run at and pushed every setting to its highest and it achieved an average FPS of 43.9fps at 1280 x 1024 (see image in gallery), proving the 8800GTS is one of the best price to performance ratio cards on the market.

We have also thrown in a screen shot of the settings we were running Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas at - bearing in mind that this game seems to cripple most systems it still did a fine job of coping with the game on high settings at a respectable resolution.

Of course it does have DX10 support making it a good partner for Vista, but all our entire tests were done on Windows XP.

For overclocking we could easily overclock the card to the same settings found on the MSI 8800 GTS 320 OC (575Mhz GPU & Memory to 850Mhz). But of course you do need some reasonable cooling in your case before attempting the procedure (note we used Nvidia's own ntune tool to do the overclocking).

The only strange coincidence lies with a problem we came across when we downloaded Nvidias new driver off their website, ever since we have done this our Windows Live Messenger program keeps locking up, so we are not sure if their is a memory leak problem caused by the new driver, so it is worth investigating before hand as installing the older driver does not seem to rectify the problem.

Once again the PNY 8800GTS 320MB card is a great performing card, a bundled game or some nice utilities wouldn’t have gone a miss but that's us been picky.