Author: Scott Piercy

Editor: Nigel Woodford 

Model: ECS N8800GTS-320MX

Due to several missteps on their part, ATI has somewhat missed the boat this generation when it comes to releasing products competitive with its number one graphics rival, Nvidia. Nvidia has held the “mind share” high ground for months now with its G80 architecture GPU's, the first generation of GPU's supporting unified shader architecture and DirectX10.

Though Nvidia has yet to saturate the low end market with it's upcoming value oriented G8x variants, they seem to be doing a good job in the enthusiast sector with their midrange offering the 8800GTS. Relative to their high end 8800GTX, there are a few significant differences in their middle range GTS parts.

The biggest areas of difference are clearly the lower number of stream processors and the lowered memory interface bus width. Also, with the 8800GTS coming in two memory variants (the lower end parts utilizing only 320MB of GDDR3) there will be some impact in gaming with the lower end part, especially with larger texture sets or with extreme high resolutions. Still, the roughly $100 price differential between 320MB and 640MB 8800GTS's definitely makes the 320MB variant attractive to the budget conscious gamer.  

It's this budget conscious customer, the ECS N8800GTS-320MX is obviously aiming for. Let's move on and take a peek inside the box.