With the release of their 8800GT 256MX card, ECS has taken an interesting route. Rather than go against NVIDIA’s wishes as to the pricing of a 512MB 8800GT card, ECS enabled 256MB on this card and offer a BIOS to update it to 512MB. The card is available online from Newegg for $169.99 which is $20 less than the regularly priced 512MB version. The 512MB version currently has a mail-in rebate of $20 bringing it down to the $179.99 price range making the choice one of whether to get a 512MB or 256MB card that can be flashed to 512MB very easy as the 512MB card has the Warranty which may be voided if Flashing the 256MB version.
If the price comes down as it was recently at $129.99 (after MIR), the 256MB version is easy to recommend. Performance on the ECS 8800GT 256MX card was less than the other 8800GT cards we have reviewed, mainly due to the reference clock speeds and the 256MB of frame buffer memory on the board. Once all the memory was enabled through the BIOS Flash, the card was decidedly higher performing in every benchmark. This is due to the extra memory as anti-aliasing settings add to the memory drain on a card while playing games. The 8800GT from ECS is an interesting card, as few other manufacturers just turn off extra memory as the expense is higher to produce cards with more memory than cards with less memory.
