For Sale: EVGA e-GeForce 8800GTS 320MB KO ACS3 Graphics Card

[Penfold101]

Taken from my PC as I've just upgraded the graphics card in it, I now have my old one for sale. This cost me over 200 squid last September, and now retail for around £90 - such is the world of computing... They go on eBay for about the same, and so I'm offering mine here for £70 delivered. Drivers are contained in Windows, and are available off the Nvidia Website. It is a simple plug and play, Windows will do the rest.

My main reason for changing is my gaming - I do quite a bit and although this card was good when it was released, the market has been flooded recently with new models and to play current games at maximum settings etc I decided a new card was in order. Unless you're playing Flight Sim and/or Crysis at maximum settings and need incredibly high frame rates, this card will provide everything you need.

Below is the review from Custom PC magazine.

Any questions just get in touch


EVGA e-GeForce 8800GTS 320MB KO ACS3


Price:£218.55 inc VAT
Review Date:Sep 2007
Speed: 35/40 88%
Features: 27/30 90%
Value: 22/30 73%
Overall:84%











Verdict: Custom coolers make for killer clocks from this well-designed card.

Custom cooling methods for graphics cards have come in all shapes and sizes over the years. Some are great, while others are rubbish, and several perform so closely to the reference cooler that you wonder why the manufacturer bothered at all. The EVGA e-GeForce 8800GTS 320MB KO ACS3 (we'll call it the 8800GTS KO for short) features a custom heatsink that demands kudos for its apparent simplicity alone.

The clever people at EVGA have looked at the reference GeForce 8800 cooling, asked themselves, 'Why doesn't it have a backplate?' and then decided to add one. Then they've looked at the bog-standard plastic heatsink shroud and thought, 'That looks boring, let's replace it with a chunky metal shroud in matt black. And let's add a funky silver EVGA logo, too.' This isn't a revolution in heatsink design, but it's the sort of common sense, 'see room for improvement, make improvement' design philosophy we appreciate.

Under the hefty cooling gear beats the heart of an 8800 GTS, tweaked to provide a more aggressive speed. The GPU is set to 588MHz and the RAM to 920MHz (1.84GHz effective), which is 15-17.6 per cent faster than the stock speed. This substantial increase should provide a significant boost to the frame rates, especially as it means that the 20 ROPs also work harder. However, EVGA hasn't touched the 96 stream processors - they still run at 1.2GHz.

Thanks to the hefty overclock, the 8800GTS KO was a good 5-7fps faster than a standard 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS in F.E.A.R. in our 1,680 x 1,050 test, and slightly outperformed the standard 640MB model. The game should never stutter with this card powering it. The extra RAM allows the 640MB 8800 GTS to pull away at 1,920 x 1,200 (the extra memory space helps high-resolution anti-aliasing), so like every 320MB 8800 GTS, the 8800GTS KO is best suited to 1,680 x 1,050 resolutions and below.

Need for Speed: Carbon also places the 8800GTS KO on a par with the 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS at 1,680 x 1,050, with a minimum speed of 33fps and a 45fps average. These results are pretty much identical to the 34fps minimum and 45fps average we saw from the 640MB 8800 GTS in our graphics card Labs test. A plain 320MB 8800 GTS will score a minimum of 30fps and an average of 41fps, so the overclock provides tangibly better performance. However, a 640MB 8800 GTS outperforms this card at 1,920 x 1,200 with its minimum of 26fps, compared to this card's 15fps.

Not surprisingly, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. completes the picture, with the 8800GTS KO nearly matching the 640MB 8800 GTS at the 1,680 x 1,050 test, and providing a minimum speed of 33fps, compared to 35fps from the 640MB card. Again, in our highest-resolution test, the 640MB card pulls away with a minimum of 29fps compared to the 20fps of the 8800GTS KO, but this is to be expected. Still, this card's scores are a step up from those of a plain 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS, which scores 2-5fps less, depending on the test settings.

In the DX9 benchmark for Company of Heroes, the game managed a playable minimum of 26fps and an average of 66fps at 1,680 x 1,050, but couldn't go beyond that. In the DX10 test, the game wouldn't run satisfactorily at the same resolution. We're yet to be convinced by current DirectX 10 offerings, especially given the performance hit, but there are rumours that Crysis will be kinder. We stress the word 'rumours' though.

Convinced that we could squeeze more out of that custom cooling arrangement, we pushed the GPU to the dizzy heights of 650MHz, with the RAM at 950MHz (1.9GHz effective). Considering that the standard clocks are 500MHz for the GPU and 800MHz (1,600MHz effective) for the RAM, this is a large total overclock. The extra boost provided another step up in performance, although it still wasn't enough to make F.E.A.R. playable at 1,920 x 1,050. It's also worth noting that this amount of performance isn't necessarily guaranteed; we may have been lucky, with a particularly good GPU.

Conclusion

Pre-overclocked cards tend to be too close in price to the next card up on the performance scale to make them a clear-cut potential purchase. Even the 8800GTS KO may not look quite the bargain it could be, as it offers a performance boost of around 16 per cent (taking a crudely weighted average of the two clock speeds) for around 21 per cent more money (plain 320MB 8800 GTS cards now sell for £180). However, compare this card with the next card up on the performance ladder - a plain 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS - and the story is slightly different. This card offers roughly the same performance as the 640MB at 1,680 x 1,050, but costs £15 less (at the time of writing). Of course, the plain 640MB card is more likely to fall in price than this cherry-picked 320MB card but, at the moment, this card is a better buy. It can't handle resolutions higher than 1,680 x 1,050 as successfully as the 640MB version, but if you're using a screen larger than 22in, you'll find the 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS restrictive anyway and should invest in a GeForce 8800 GTX.