There is a single good reason why many GeForce 8800 GTS owners are trying to flog off their graphics cards and that is the arrival of the GeForce 8800 GT.
The new 8800 GT is not only considerably faster than the 8800 GTS, but amazingly it is also much cheaper. Many readers have asked why this is and how Nvidia can just release a graphics card that eliminates most of its high-end line up! It is pretty simple really. The GeForce 8800 GTX was released a year ago now and is very much at the end of its lifespan.
This also happens to coincide with an upcoming release from main competitor AMD/ATI, who will unleash their next-gen cards as soon as next week, and no doubt Nvidia will quickly follow suit. Furthermore being so late in the game, it is unlikely that gamers are still throwing themselves at GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS graphics cards, with many holding out for what is to come.
Considering that Nvidia did telly up a bill of around $400 million dollars developing the GeForce 8800 architecture, it is only natural that they want to juice the investment for all it's worth.
So how do you make an end of life product look like new again and more importantly how do you make it sell like hot cakes? Well you would do exactly what Nvidia has done with the GeForce 8800 GT: make it nearly as fast as your high-end product and sell it at half the price! For those holding out to see what the next generation ATI graphics cards are going to be like, you may as well find the 8800 GT too hard to resist and I am sure this is exactly what Nvidia is banking on, stealing a little thunder from whatever AMD has got to show us soon.
The GeForce 8800 GT was officially launched on October 29th and was made available on retail immediately. Today just two weeks later, the card is supposed to be everywhere but it's been extremely hard to keep up with the demand for the card. Nvidia announced that the suggested retail price for the GeForce 8800 GT would be $200 for the 256MB version and around $250 for the 512MB version. Currently the average 512MB 8800 GT graphics card costs between $270-$290, slightly above the MSRP, which is not that unusual for a product that has only just recently been released.
At this point we must recommend you to wait just for a week or two until availability increases and the pricing of these 8800 GT graphics cards levels off. This should also give time to see how the new ATI cards perform. But we can understand the feeling, the "Crysis effect" is everywhere and we just want to run the damn game with all those wacky visual effects set to 'high'.
In the meantime, there is a number of interesting GeForce 8800 GT offerings that you should check out before settling for any brand, such is the case of the the Inno3D 8800 GT that we have here today. While this particular Inno3D product still makes use of the Nvidia reference cooler and a green PCB, it comes overclocked out of the box for optimum performance under warranty.