The new G92 is currently NVIDIA's hottest GPU. It sells like mad on several different products like the GeForce 8800 GT and GTS 512MB versions. Since both of them are still fairly expensive and ATI has solid offerings in the $170 range, NVIDIA decided to create the GeForce 8800 GS based on the G92 GPU but with less performance features. They took G92 cores and disabled 24 shader units and 4 raster operation units. The memory bus has also been reduced from 256-bit to 192-bit which explains the odd memory size of 384MB. EVGA being an early adopter has secured a large allocation of the GeForce 8800 GS and is one of the first companies to offer their products on the market. - techPowerUp!

EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GS 384MB Video Card Review

The card follows the NVIDIA specifications to the letter, other companies offer preoverclocked cards here for a small premium. EVGA uses a package design in yellow and black, it surprises us that the company logo is so small and can be quite hard to find if you don't know the color scheme to look for. The back has an extra sheet of paper that has additional languages. The card designs looks quite nifty with the pretty print on the cooler. Other than that the cooler is pretty much identical to the GeForce 8800 GT cooler. Since the card is targeted at the mid-range performance segment the single slot cooler is fine to keep the card cool.

The cooler uses a baseplate made from copper which transfers the heat to a number of aluminum fins. Please note how there are still eight memory pads on the cooler even though only six memory chips are installed. This is a clear sign that the cooler assembly is used on another product as well. The print on the cooler is protected by a thin plastic foil which can be peeled of to reveal a high quality shiny print. This card is compatible with SLI and can be paired with any other GeForce 8800 GS card. The power connector on the back is required to supply power to it, which is also required when running in PCI Express 2.0 mode.

To find the maximum overclock of our card we used a combination of Rivatuner, ATITool and our benchmarking suite. Overclocking the memory was extremely easy, basically you set the clock to 2000MHz which should always work since 1.0ns chips are installed and then work your way up from there. When overclocking the core, the first thing you should enable is independent shader clock adjustments, then find the maximum stable shader clock. From then on the overclocks revert instantly because NVIDIA has put a lock into their driver which limits the core clock to a maximum of 680MHz.

EVGA is asking about $170 for the GeForce 8800 GS which makes the card a great deal. When we first looked at the specifications of the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GS we weren't sure if the card had enough steam to compete in the $150-200 segment which is basically owned by AMD's Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870. Without overclocking the card sits nicely in between these two video cards offering great performance for its price. However the card has some very important advantages over the offerings from AMD. First it is quiet, and by quiet we do not mean just a bit quieter, but almost silent.

The most amazing fact is the overclocking potential of this card. The only difficulty is getting past the 680MHz core clock limit of the NVIDIA drivers. For budget oriented overclockers this card is a great deal because you can get huge performance gains for a small price. We have said countless times that we personally would never buy a video card for more than $250 because it's just a waste of money for too little performance gained. With the GeForce 8800 GS you can have both a great price, massive overclocking and blazing performance.