"I have to be honest, I went into this review with high hopes but very concerned whether or not the lower memory clockspeed was going to affect performance, and the fact that the firmware needed to be flashed in order to reach 512MB. I was wondering where the other 256MB would come from; was it on the card or used as shared memory from the system? All sorts of things were going through my mind, but no matter what, as a reviewer you have to maintain the objectivity with any product you go into testing. So I started on it looking back and forth between the ECS 8800 GT and other 8800 GTs. I started to notice little things during the review, like the memory on the ECS board was the same brand as the ones on the ASUS card and that there were the same number of chips. So I started to think if it is so alike physically, then it should perform close to the same. Boy was I surprised! At 256MB, the card was behind, but that was expected for half of the memory buffer as the 512MB cards, but man, after that update the decrease in the memory clock did not seem to be that big of a deal."