Wow another week went by and NVIDIA has already made its own card to compete with the GeForce 8800 GT, and it comes in the form of the new GeFroce 8800 GTS 512MB edition. This comes in the wake of more than a few new releases that we have seen in the last few weeks and shows NVIDIA being more aggressive than ever in their marketing strategies. EVGA is right in step with this release like always and has cards available on the internet already in time for the launch. NVIDIA did keep their word on the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB cards and had stock in the major online stores. Everyone just plain hates a paper launch so this bodes well and shows better pre-sale preparation. - Motherboards

EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB Video Board Review

With Christmas just a few short weeks away NVIDIA will be making a killing in the graphics card sales game as even though ATI has touted they will have a new card available, it has yet to surface leaving the playing field dominated by the boys in green. At the moment NVIDIA holds the crown in both the entry level and high-end 3D graphics market and if you could peek into their overall scheme you would see they have much more up their sleeves in store for us in the coming months. Look for new chipset motherboards and video cards to become available at the turn of the year.

If you pay close attention to details you will see that most of the reference GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB versions of the card have core, memory and shader clocks that are slower than the ones on the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB edition card. The EVGA card is however clocked faster than the normal cards and its core speed is 670MHz, the memory is clocked at 1940MHz and the shader clock is at 1675MHz. This is faster than NVIDIA's standard specifications for the card. And yes, PCI Express 2.0 is also supported and should work with motherboards that support this, and doubling the available bandwidth.

Many people like the two slot design of the GTS cards due to the larger fan and better airflow over the cards capacitors, this is a good thing but as stated the card occupies two slots in able to accommodate this and that can get airflow restrictive in an SLI system where the cards almost touch. The cards do cooler though than their GeForce 8800 GT single slot brethren so that should help keep things a bit cooler in an SLI situation. The card has an excellent graphics on the face of the card that makes it look almost like old weather beaten metal and comes with a single power connection.

It seems that NVIDIA is bent on just taking over the entire graphics arena in both the high and low-end market at the same time. This can be clearly seen with their recent release strategy. EVGA will most likely have a few different variations of this card available from standard clocked models and a few overclocked types as well. This card beats almost the rest of the NVIDIA lineup other than the GeForce 8800 Ultra and is a very solid gaming solution. The artists at EVGA did a far superior job on the coloring and label of their e-GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB edition as the card just looks awesome.

This is the hottest selling time of the year and even though NVIDIA cards are in high demand the sales growth is phenomenal and this adds to the lack of available cards as everyone is trying to buy them. The new GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB is a very fast card and it plays games very well to boot. The thing is the GeFroce 8800 GT 256MB is a tough act to follow as far as pricing and performance ratios are concerned as yes this card is faster, but will gamers notice that much of a difference from a visual standpoint alone in many games? Probably not, unless they are playing at very high resolutions and have fun.