Final Verdict

FiringSquad says:

While the concept of a 1GB GeForce 8800 GT looks good on paper, in practice with today’s latest games, the additional memory largely sits unused.

In the majority of our performance tests, the 1GB GeForce 8800 GT card delivered performance that was roughly on par with the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, there were only a couple of cases where the extra memory really impacted performance, most notably Oblivion and Crysis at 2560x1600, in both of these situations the GeForce 8800 GT 1GB was able to outperform the 8800 GT 512MB by a significant margin (over 2.5 times the performance in Oblivion and even larger in Crysis).

The bottom line is that the stock GeForce 8800 GT 512MB is simply an outstanding performer, adding another 512MB of memory just doesn’t yield the performance boost some were expecting.

Palit’s GeForce 8800 GT Super+1GB is still a very nice card though. The custom cooler Palit has developed performs significantly better than the stock GeForce 8800 GT reference cooler designed by NVIDIA. The only downside to the Palit cooler is that it requires a second slot. We also really appreciate the fact that Palit includes an HDMI adapter inside the card’s packaging. Given the target audience of this card, we think this feature will likely come in handy more than including a second DVI-to-VGA adapter would.

In closing, while we like the Palit GeForce 8800 GT Super+1GB, given the fact that the board currently sells for about the same price as the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB yet performs largely on par with the GeForce 8800 GT, we feel that a factory overclocked GeForce 8800 GT 512MB like Palit’s own GeForce 8800 GT Sonic represents a better value. A factory OC’ed GeForce 8800 GT 512MB will perform faster overall and cost less, for instance the Palit Sonic board sells for $50 less than the Super+1GB on TigerDirect. We’d advise our readers to save their money and opt for the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, or if you can afford to spend the $350-$400 that the GeForce 8800 GT Super+1GB sells for, get the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB instead.

UPDATE: NCIX USA now sells the Super+1GB for $295.16, placing it a few dollars below Palit's own MSRP. At this price the card is just $15-$30 more than factory OC'ed cards from BFG and Galaxy. If this price holds true, it would definitely make the Palit 1GB a better value, especially considering it's unique cooling and the addition of HDMI.