DX10 Support

The 8800 is the first card to support Microsoft's new DirectX 10 standard. However, unless you are really desperate to be the first person you know to have Vista running with the new Aero theme showing its full glory, there is little else that can be gained from this feature at this point. There are a few games that currently support DX10, Company of Heroes being perhaps the most popular. However, if you are buying this card simply for its DX10 features, you would be well advised to take a serious look at whether this is the right time to do so. Later this year many more games will be released which support this feature, and Vista's larger holes should have been fixed by then so it may be better to hold off buying this card until then.

Noise & Cooling

The 8800's stock equipped cooler is actually not too bad. This goes back on my normal philosophy of "If it's stock, don't bother"; this cooler actually did an alright job. My first impression of it was poor as the card idled in the high sixties. However, cranking up the fan speed soon sorted that, causing it to idle at mid fifites and load at high sixties to low seventies. At 100% the fan is noisy enough to annoy, but not horrendous. Messing about with speed settings soon gave me the much sort for mixture between good cooling performance and low noise. Setting the fan to 85% gives enough cooling performance to allow an overclock that will keep you happy, and also mean that you arn't annoyed by the fan noise.

Cost

This card is currently retailing for around four hundred of your fine English pounds. Considering this is the worlds fastest GPU, you can't really be surprised with the rather weighty price tag. However, second hand ones can now be picked up for around £300 and I am sure that when the R600 is released these prices will fall again, making this card a very affordable, high end gaming solution.