EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX KO ACS3

EVGA is no stranger to a FiringSquad roundup, having submitting cards for our review for several years now. EVGA’s cards have proven quite popular among our readership thanks to several compelling features.

Arguably the most compelling feature EVGA provides on their cards is their lifetime warranty program. Once the end user registers their card on evga.com, the standard 1-year warranty is kicked up to a lifetime warranty: as long as you own the card, it is backed by EVGA’s warranty. The really nice part about EVGA’s warranty is that it covers modding. Say for instance you want to swap out your card’s stock cooling unit with a Zalman or Arctic Cooling Accelero. Under EVGA’s lifetime warranty program, you can replace your stock cooler without voiding the card’s warranty: as long as you don’t physically damage the card, EVGA will honor their lifetime warranty.

Another feature EVGA offers that’s proven popular with users is their Step Up upgrade program. With Step Up, you can trade in your existing EVGA graphics card for a faster EVGA model, provided the upgrade occurs within 90 days of the original card purchase. Say for instance you pick up a GeForce 8800 GTX today, and a month from now a faster card comes out. With EVGA’s Step Up program, you’ll get the full value of your original GTX card, so if you paid $500 for your old card and you want to upgrade to a $600 card, you merely pay the difference of $100. The only downside to Step Up is that you can only use it once, so you’ll have to choose when to use Step Up wisely. A lot of enthusiasts used Step Up last year to upgrade from the GeForce 7900 GT/GTO/GTX to the GeForce 8800 GTX. Considering that the 8800 GTX delivers a 2X performance increase over the 7900 GTX, upgrading in this fashion makes the most sense.



EVGA is also known for delivering excellent game bundles with their cards. EVGA does a really good job of keeping their game bundle up to date, offering newly released games as bundles rather than outdated games that are often a year old or more. Right now for instance EVGA is offering a free copy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars with select EVGA graphics cards, including the GeForce 8800 GTX. We’re crossing our fingers that EVGA will have something similar for Crysis when it debuts in November.

The e-GeForce 8800 GTX KO ACS3 is one of EVGA’s higher-end GeForce 8800 GTX boards. As its name implies, the card is overclocked from the factory, running at 626MHz core and 1.0GHz memory (2.0GHz effective). This puts its clock speeds about on par with the other 1st generation factory overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX cards. Cooling duties are handled by a modified version of the stock NVIDIA reference heatsink/fan unit used by most of the other cards in this roundup. Normally we’re a little disappointed by the stock reference coolers designed by AMD and NVIDIA as they tend to pale in comparison to aftermarket units from the likes of Arctic Cooling and Zalman, but in the case of the stock GeForce 8800 GTX cooler we’re actually quite impressed with it. The dual-slot cooler does an effective job of keeping the GPU cool while generating next to no noise, and even exhausts hot air from the GPU out the back of your case. It’s certainly one of the better, if not the best, reference coolers ever devised.

For ACS3 cards EVGA adds a massive black duct enclosure to the top of the stock NVIDIA dual-slot heatsink/fan unit on the card. For added cooling, EVGA then finishes the KO ACS3 board with an aluminum heatsink which rests on the bottom of the card, directly underneath the GPU. This helps to keep board temps down, although it can lead to compatibility issues with some motherboards – if the North Bridge is located close to your PCI Express graphics slot, this heatsink can rub on the heatsink covering the North Bridge. Fortunately most Core 2 motherboards don’t suffer from this problem. It is an issue for AMD-based nForce 590 SLI motherboards like the ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe.

Hardware accessories bundled with the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX KO ACS3 include two DVI adapters, a component video cable, S-Video cable, and two power cables. We should also note that EVGA does not include Enemy Territory: Quake Wars inside the packaging of the ACS3 card. You must fill out this form in order to receive your copy of the game.