EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GS 384 MB review at TechPowerUp

OMG! I guess that during my hiatus, I had accidentally missed another 'silent' product that came from NVIDIA. 8800 GS, another derivative off G92 GPU (well, I initially thought it was based off G8x ) are already in the market. However, I cannot sense it being publicized much compared to like 8800 GT and GTS 512. Could it be a gap-filler solution? A gap between 8600 GTS and 8800 GTS 320, or GTS 320 and GT? Or something else?

Anyway, we've got one of them under reviewer's microscope at TechPowerUp. EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GS 384 MB. So basically, this is what they say about what 8800 GS actually is:

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The G92 is currently NVIDIA's hottest (not temperature) GPU. It sells like mad on several different products like 8800 GT and 8800 GTS 512 MB. Since both of them are still fairly expensive and ATI has solid offerings in the $170 range, NVIDIA decided to create the GeForce 8800 GS based on the G92 GPU but with less performance features. They took G92 cores and disabled 24 shader units and 4 ROPs. The memory bus has also been reduced from 256 bit to 192 bit which explains the odd memory size of 384 MB.
"

You're dead right it's odd! Basically, after all that crippling, 8800 GS is left with the specs like this:

Shader Units : 96
ROPS : 12
Transistors : 754M (exactly like 8800 GT)
Memory Bus Width : 192-bit
Memory Size : 384 MB
Coere Clock : 500 MHz
Memory Clock : 800 MHz

All that for $170. It's a head-to-head competition against HD 3850 (duhh! Now I understand!).

It's an interesting review, so head over to TechPowerUp to read the verdict.