ECS Elitegroup is no stranger to the PC world producing a huge number of motherboards for their own line as well as OEM. They took a small leave of absence after the introduction of their 680i-SLI motherboard series and didn’t release any more enthusiast based platforms. However, they did stay with putting emphasis on their graphics card lines releasing some pretty decent budget and upper performing cards.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see many, if any, here in the states… I asked their U.S. rep why that was and it basically came down to marketing access. Well, something must have got the gears of progress spinning because we’ve started seeing more and more ECS graphics cards beyond the budget models. Enter the ECS Elitegroup 8800GT 256MB Graphics Card.

Why would anyone consider selling a 256MB graphics card as opposed to 512MB? Besides affordability, they haven’t completely been lacking in performance. This is partly due to the sudden improvement in the graphics driver software as well as some graphics BIOS revisions that have opened up the cards to more performance. ECS has also released a new BIOS for their N8800GT 256MX PCI Express 2.0 Graphics Card which is starting to circulate like a good free online music album.

While I could go in to the deeper, more technical functions as to what has been unlocked or given new wings to offer better performance, most of you are more concerned with these questions. Why the new BIOS? (Which you already know the answer to.) Does it work? And, what kind of performance boost do we get?

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