XFX’s ExTreme version of the high-end Ultra card raises the stakes.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any crazier in the video card market, NVIDIA ups the ante with the new Ultra. By tweaking – at the hardware level – with the specifications of its 8800 GTX card, NVIDIA has developed a new top dog that gets 37 more megahertz from its core clock, 150 more megahertz from its shader clock and 180 more megahertz from its memory clock, with an additional 17.3 GB/sec of memory bandwidth and an additional 2.4 billion textures per second in fill rate.  Even with an MSRP of $699, that makes for some very impressive numbers.

However, you FPS junkies should hold your salivating for just a moment, because those are the stock figures. Since we’ll be looking at the ExTreme version of the Ultra from XFX, there’s additional performance to be had – at an additional price, of course – guaranteed to be built in, no overclocking needed. Today we’ll be taking a look at the Ultra ExTreme card, those additional performance boosts and what the whole package means to you as a gamer. Let’s dive in.

Specifications
As per usual XFX standards, the ExTreme is the middle of the line in Ultra cards between the stock version and the XXX. Both the XXX and the ExTreme take the modifications NVIDIA started on the Ultra and push them to the next level. In the case of the ExTreme, those boosts work out to 38 more megahertz from the core clock, 105 more megahertz from the shader clock and 400 more megahertz from the memory clock. While these changes don’t have any effect on the memory bandwidth and texture fill rate, they are areas you’d boost yourself if you were overclocking the card, leading to the standard bit of wisdom about “flavored” XFX cards: they’re only worth the money if you don’t want to overclock the card yourself. You can see the full specifications of the card here.

One interesting note about these specifications: the Ultra ExTreme doesn’t cost that much more than competing stock cards, even with those performance increases. If you’re looking at buying an Ultra, chances are price really isn’t an object – so I’ll stop mentioning it – but clearly when it comes down to dollars per megahertz, the Ultra ExTreme is very competitive.