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EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS KO ACS³ Edition Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Saturday, 13 May 2006 |
GamePyre shares a review on the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS KO ACS³ SuperClock graphics card. EVGA is one of the top NVIDIA card manufacturers in the United States in terms of sales and volume. EVGA cards are known for highly overclocked versions of NVIDIA reference cards and for their support and warranty. Founded a few years ago, their CO (Copper), ACS³ and Signature Editions are all the best of the breed of NVIDIA cards. AGP cards are a dying breed. Very few new systems are sold today with the AGP bus interface, with the PCI Express bus replacing it. It's likely the GeForce 7800 GS will be the last AGP high-end card.
 EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS KO ACS³ Edition Review
The first thing you see when looking at the card is the cool black copper heat sink covering 100% of the front of the e-GeForce 7800 GS. The black heatsink is EVGA's patented Copper heatsink, covering the memory modules. The GeForce 7800 GS has 256MB of GDDR3 memory rated at 1.4ns. EVGA has clocked the e-GeForce 7800 GS KO ACS³ memory at 1400MHz, a full 100MHz higher than NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GS reference clock of 1.3GHz. The GeForce 7800 GS is an AGP8x card. The AGP8x bus has a maximum bandwidth of 2.1GB/second between the AGP card and the system.
EVGA clocked the e-GeForce 7800 GS CO KO ACS³ SuperClock card at 490MHz. This is a huge increase over the reference clock of 350MHz for the GeForce 7800 GS. No other GeForce 7800 GS on the market comes close to this clock speed, meaning the EVGA card is the fastest of the breed. The card successfully overclocked to 516/1450MHz. The GeForce 7800 GS is a slightly modified GeForce 7800, with 16 instead of 24 pixel pipelines. The key features of the GeForce 7800 GS are support for Microsoft's DirectX 9.0c, with the full Shader Model 3.0 support and features.
The good points of the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS KO ACS³ SuperClock video card include Shader Model 3.0 support, the fastest performance for an AGP card and support for HDR. There are still a lot of systems out there with an AGP slot, and the GeForce 7800 GS is the perfect card for that market. For the AMD Athlon 64 user that has an AGP system the GeForce 7800 GS is an excellent upgrade. Oblivion players will love the e-GeForce 7800 GS from EVGA as it's the most feature rich video card available for the AGP market today, and EVGA's card is the fastest AGP card hands down.
Further, it has EVGA's Step-Up program and the Lifetime Warranty, so support is not a question. This card has the unique distinction of having the ACS³ cooling, the Copper heatsink and being a superclocked card. On the other hand, AGP is likely to be totally gone after this year, with no upgrades in sight once Vista reaches the market. In this case, the choice of an AGP card today may be interesting and it might be better to buy a new motherboard, video card and CPU than to upgrade the old video card. It all depends how old the system is, what CPU you have and what upgrade path you might want to take later.
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