Many readers are well aware that the current situation with gaming graphics cards is quite alarming. We have every reason to believe that competition in this market segment is at risk. We can all see that NVIDIA products dominate on the market, while the second market player ATI is being dislodged from the market after its merger with AMD. AMD launched the new cards anyway. But there are a number of serious problems with drivers, and there is still no flagship to compete with top solutions from NVIDIA. The Radeon HD 2900 XT can compete only with the GeForce 8800 GTS, and it comes at the same price. Thus the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra series are beyond competition. - Digit-Life

EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS and Ultra Version Review

The situation is clear, and it's common knowledge that the GeForce 8800 series are the fastest and widest high-end family, with a total of four models ranging from $300 to $700. The most popular graphics card is the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB. It has an attractive price, and it's not outperformed much by the model with 640MB of memory. Today we are going to examine such a card made by EVGA, which works at increased frequencies. Besides, we'll examine the fastest card to date, the GeForce 8800 Ultra, which also works at increased frequencies. Both cards are manufactured by NVIDIA's orders.

That means EVGA have nothing to do with their manufacturing. But these cards were thoroughly tested by the company to select samples that can operate at the increased frequencies. Besides, the reference cooler has been slightly modified. Looking at the Ultra SuperClocked model, which features 768MB of high performance GDDR3 memory from Samsung rated at 0.8ns, which actually means an operating clock speed of 2500MHz effective. The GTS ACS³ KO edition on the other hand comes with only 320MB of GDDR3 memory from Samsung rated at 1.0ns, so good for 2000MHz effective.

As already mentioned, these are reference cards except for the cooler on the GeForce 8800 GTS. Both coolers are very quiet. They do not get noisier even when they raise their rotational speed. It's another proof of the high efficiency of these cooling systems. Also both graphics card require additional power, with the Ultra even being in more demand and coming with two external power connections. As we continue, both cards come in a quite similar cardboard box with on the back the serial numbers listed. That's an old tradition with EVGA products and the graphics card is bagged separately.

The increased frequencies have a higher effect on compute intensive applications, as the shader unit frequency has been raised much higher than frequencies of other units. They result in a noticeable performance gain in shader intensive games. The EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS ACS³ KO edition is a very good product. It's probably the best graphics card, if the prices are on the level of similar products. Even though it's sometimes defeated by the Radeon HD 2900 XT, this card is much cooler. Besides, it's more efficient when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering modes are enabled.

The EVGA e-GeForce 8800 Ultra SuperClocked belongs to the group of the fastest single-GPU graphics cards for games. Its price will certainly be high, so the card will be affordable only to enthusiasts, its target audience. As the card differs from the reference design only in its increased frequencies, it possesses all pros and cons of the latter. The above mentioned cards have no more bonuses. The bundles are quite unassuming. In our opinion, such products might have come with bonuses, for example, like ASUS or BFG products.