Okay, so the cheaper 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS alternative has been out in force for a little over a month now and at just $300 US it is a great buy. Realistically in this price bracket the GeForce 8800 GTS (320MB) runs somewhat unopposed, though the Radeon X1950XT cards are now very cheap. However, those looking at purchasing a GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card have to make the tough decision to spend either $300 US or $400 US. Of course if you are limited to a $300 US budget then the 320MB version of the 8800 GTS becomes an obvious choice.

However, if you have that extra $100 and are tossing up whether or not to spend it on the original 640MB version, we are going to find out if you should hand over the extra cash for the extra memory. Given the only difference between these two products is the amount of onboard memory, the $100 US price difference is quite significant. The price difference makes the 640MB version 33% more expensive, but will it be 33% faster? This will be interesting to find out, but ultimately I think most users are going to appreciate the 320MB 8800 GTS simply because it offers them high-end Direct X10 performance for just $300 US.

Generally when a new graphics card such as the GeForce 8800 GTS (320MB) is released, there is much more to talk about such as increased pipelines, additional memory bandwidth, different clock frequencies for both the core and memory. However as I mentioned earlier, there is absolutely no difference between the 320MB and 640MB versions of the GeForce 8800 GTS, other than the onboard memory capacity of course. Both GPU’s are based on the G80 architecture which features a 90nm design process.

Furthermore both graphics cards support SLI technology using the PCI Express 16x bus. The core operates at 500MHz while the GDDR3 memory is clocked at 1600MHz with a shader clock of 1200MHz. Using a 320-bit wide memory bus the 8800 GTS develops a memory bandwidth of 64.0GB/s. The 8800 GTS cards that we have used for this comparison are both ASUS brand products and while they share similar specifications, they also look very much the same. They both operate at the intended Nvidia specifications, so neither card features any kind of special factory overclocking.