14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that XFX are the first lucky ones that have received Nvidia's approval to build an overclocked version of the 8800GTX/GTS. The bomb comes only several days after OCZ has announced the intention to produce overclocked G80 based cards. While OCZ has said that they will test the cards in order to produce only highly overclockable samples, XFX has actually succeeded in doing what all the others couldn't.
The XFX XXX GeForce 8800 GTX is the first DirectX 10 card that comes factory-overclocked. The core runs at 630 MHz and the memory goes as high as 2.0 GHz, NVIDIA's reference clocks for the 8800GTX are 575 MHz for the GPU and 1.8 GHz for the 384-bit wide memory. XFX has also announced a preoverclocked 8800GTS that will have the same XXX header. This card will come with 550MHz core clock and 1.8 GHz memory clock from the default 500 MHz core and 1.6 GHz memory that were specified for Nvidia.
Aside from that XFX has pretuned the BIOS of the video cards ensuring that they will perform flawlessly under heavy overclocking conditions. As a result, latencies have been rewritten and the card clocks can go higher than ever. I wonder how long will it take for someone to brake the ORB records with the help of these cards.
Pricing is expected to go as high as $649 for the XXX GeForce 8800 GTX and should stay at $499 for the GeForce 8800 GTS. As for the availability, the card is already in mass production and will be entering the stores very soon. I'm not sure how to interpret Nvidia's move but I'm glad that they've changed their mind regarding the overclocking of G80. The fun part just got back in the game.