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Guess what -- there's a new kid on the block. And although this new kid has the same name as that old one you may have known as the 8800 GTS, this newcomer's bringing a whole new level of firepower to town.  

We have two cards to look at today. The fine folks at Asus have provided us with our first look at this new arrival: the overclocked EN8800 GTS 512 MB T.O.P, while our friends at XFX were kind enough to send us a overclocked GeForce 8800GTS 512 XXX Alpha Dog Edition for inspection.

Both of these reborn 8800 GTS cards are built around the same G92 GPU that powers the explosive 8800GT, and with an additional increase in the number of stream processors, these arrivals in town just might have what it takes to raise to the top of the class of '8800.

Further seperating itself from the year-old, original 320 and 640 MB 8800GTS cards we have known and loved, the new 8800 GTS is PCIe 2.0 compliant, and has an updated generation of the PureVideo HD decoding engine.

If all goes according to plan, and there are enough cards to go around, the new 512 MB 8800 GTS is expected to retail for somewhere between $300 and $350 dollars. Overclocked cards, however, may go for a little bit more, such as our Asus ($379) and XFX ($379) cards today.

As a case of out with the old and in with the new, this updated GTS marks the effective end of the 320 MB 8800 GTS line. While the 640 MB 8800 cards will still be produced for a little while longer yet, the arguably most popular series of cards in 2007, the cost-effective 320 MB 8800 GTS, has had its day in the sun, and will soon disappear off of store shelves and e-tailer's websites, as remaining stock is sold off.    

But wait. Before we going any further, we have to get something sorted out: what exactly are we going to call this new GTS? Before we get to mixed up, we should settle on a name. We have a couple of possibilities. How about the 8800 GTS V2? Revised 8800 GTS? New GTS? G92 8800 GTS? Super 8800 GTS?

A NVIDIA driver will identify one of these new cards as a GeForce 8800 GTS 512 -- that doesn't sound so bad; so how about we stick with that.

On with the show.

Editor's note: We recieved a XFX 8800 GTS Alpha Dog Edition video card recently, but unfortunately, were unable to complete testing in time for the original publication of this article. Now that we've had some more time to test the XFX 8800 GTS 512, we have ammended this review to include these results.