Codenamed G92, the Geforce 8800GT’s core is a die shrink of the successful G80 that forms the basis of the 8800Ultra, GTX and GTS.

It’s now manufactured at 65nm, rather than 90nm, and the number of transistors has risen to 754 million, from 681 million.

A smaller manufacturing process results in a lower cost, with this card (full name NX8800GT-T2D512E-HD-OC) available for just £176 - a low price for an 8800-based card.

The 8800GT has 112 stream processors, which plants it right in the middle of the 8800GTS’ 96 and the GTX’s 128. The stream processor clock sits at 8800Ultra speeds of 1.5GHz, while the rest of the GPU runs at 600MHz. As standard you get 1.8GHz of 512MB GDDR3 Ram, but MSI has overclocked this to 1.9GHz and GPU 660MHz.

The resulting performance was immense for less than £200. It breezed past the 8800GTS in most games (full results at www.reportlabs.com) and sits a whisper below the 8800GTX.

In torturous DirectX 10 games it kept its neck above the 30fps (frames per second) mark in Lost Planet all the way to 1,600x1,200 with 4x anti-aliasing turned on. Things weren’t quite as rosy in Call of Juarez, but it consistently rendered a few more frames than ATI’s new cards in our DirectX 9 benchmarks, achieving 100fps in four out of five DirectX 9 games at 1,600x1,200.

In Fear, it occasionally achieved twice the frame rate (120 vs 60fps at 1,600x1,200) of the Radeon HD 3870, but this is an Nvidia sponsored title and the reverse is often true of ATI sponsored games - although there are considerably fewer ATI-backed titles.

The fact that it’s a single-slot design makes the performance even more impressive. Its fan remains quiet and, since it is half the width of other Geforce 8800 cards, it’ll fit into the majority of computer cases. Its length (23.1cm - the same as the Radeon HD 3870) is a potential problem though, so measure before you buy.

It's not just raw gaming performance this card packs; the 8800GT also includes Purevideo 2 hardware, which is superior to the Purevideo 1 technology in other 8800 cards. It offloads more of the CPU work onto the graphics card, while achieving an higher degree of video processing, represented by a 100 out of 100 score in HQV HD. You have to enable noise-reduction in the driver, which isn't necessary on the Radeon HD 3800 series. This requires you to tweak a slider to get the right balance of noise reduction and detail retention - a task that certainly won't appeal to novices.

Purevideo 2 also isn’t as complete as ATI’s UVD in the Radeon HD 3800 series because it can’t decode VC-1 content, resulting in higher CPU usage.

Radeon HD 3800-series and 8800GT cards also take advantage of new PCI Express 2.0 slots, present on Intel’s X38 motherboards, Nvidia’s upcoming 700 series and AMD’s 770 and 790 boards. This is backwards compatible with PCI Express 1 and offers twice the bandwidth when a card and motherboard supporting the standard are combined. This means a PCI Express 2.0 slot with 16 lanes offers 8Gbytes/sec in each direction.

At present this doesn’t give meaningful boosts to graphics performance, but a more significant introduction, for graphics cards at least, is the eight-pin power adapters that provide 150W of additional power.

Since PCI Express 2.0 compatible power supplies that provide this adapter are thin on the ground, MSI and Sapphire have both used regular six-pin plugs on their cards. Even if you don’t have a six-pin adapter, both manufacturers include a standard four-pin Molex adapter.

MSI bundles two games, Colin McRae Dirt and Lord of the Rings Online, as well as an S-video adapter and cable and a DVI-VGA dongle, which makes it excellent value for money. It’s more expensive than other offerings, but it’s faster and makes all other Geforce 8800-based cards look archaic.