Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Smoking hot card-in every sense of the word!, November 15, 2007
I've owned this card for awhile now and can't say enough good things about it. I've owned both ATI and Nvidia cards in the past so I'm not impartial to either side. I'll go with whichever company has the best product at the time.
That being said, at the time of my upgrading I couldn't find any other card that even held a candle to the GTX. Not only the card itself, but the company EVGA is great as well. Their lifetime warranty is awesome, their customer forums are very helpful, the step up program allowing you to upgrade to a better card down the road is an awesome option, and they release driver updates to improve the card in a very timely fashion.
The card itself runs very hot but the included cooler does its job well, even after a heavy gaming session my GPU temps rarely go beyond 65-70C. I decided to switch it out with the Zalamn VF 1000 with optional ramsinks just because I wanted to apply my own thermal paste, like controlling fan speed, it cools a tad better than the stock cooler, and I'm a fan of Zalman products. I'm not saying the included stock cooler is inadequate, I just prefer after market coolers.
I won't go into much detail about the detailed specs, its 681 million transistors, 128 processing streams and all that jazz as you can look that up on google. The card itself though is a beast. It can play pretty much all new games on max settings, even on high resolution monitors of 1920x1200 and beyond. And in the future you can always slap in another one of these in SLI and you would be hard pressed to stress that setup!
The card is HDCP compliant so as long as all your other hardware is also your good to go in terms of playing HD movie content. The card also sports dual DVI ports and an HDTV output so you will have no trouble in connecting your gear.
The card is also very attractive to any Vista users who plan on using it's DirectX10 feature. Although 10.1 is in the works I wouldn't expect to see any games actually using it anytime soon. 10.1 doesn't even bring anything new or great to the table so don't be put off that this card "only" supports 10 and not 10.1 The new 10.1 will also be backwards compatible, you just wont be able to use the new features, which are slim to none anyway. What I would consider though is the new 8800GT card.
As much as I love my GTX, you can find the newly released 8800GT for HALF the price of the GTX while only trailing in performance by about %10 or a few FPS in games! You can put TWO 8800GT's in your rig for a %50 gain over the GTX for the SAME price! If price is of no concern then of course go with pairing up the GTX or Ultras, but price wise the 8800GT absolutely cannot be beat. Be aware bargain shoppers. There are also rumors of both ATI and Nvidia releasing their next flagship models in the near future, but in the tech world this is ongoing, and if your waiting for the next big thing you will be no the fence forever!
So as of right now I am only running 1 of these cards but always have the option of dropping another one onto my 680i board if the need arises. I really do consider this card one of the most groundbreaking in terms of upgrading. All my previous GPU upgrades didn't bring a whole lot in terms of performance, but the 8800 series of cards will bring it all, AND a bag of Cheese Doodles baby! I'm very impressed with this card, and hopefully with the release of the cheap 8800GT it will lower the price of this model--then I can make my move and buy another one to pair them up! :D
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great card! However, Nvidia needs better Vista drivers as of 3/29/2007, March 30, 2007
The card is blistering fast. I just wish it didn't take a performance hit in Vista. It also has several other odd issues that I've become accustomed to when buying bleeding edge technology. (e.g. the official drivers released in February 2007 are missing several features in Windows Vista. Like good TV-Out support, Hibernation support, proper Ntune support. The March 2007 released Vista beta drivers seems to cause a lot of people to have video driver crashes during games. Check Nvidia's message board for more info.)
Once Nvidia straightens out their Vista drivers issues, this card will be golden. As it is, the latest Beta drivers did improve performance... but it introduced some stability issues.
Also, EVGA's 90-day Step-Up program will hopefully allow me to jump into the 8900 series that is rumored to be released late-April 2007.
LASTLY... it puts off an odd digital whine in 3D games and when resizing windows. I returned one (with green circuitboard) and got a new one form Amazon (black circuitboard) and it did the same thing. Amazon reimbursed me the return shipping! The digital whine isn't too bad, but its fairly annoying if you have your game sound really low. I play with headphones, so I don't really care.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
EVGA 8800 GTX rocks, November 17, 2007
What more can be said about the 2nd fastest video card in the world? Only the Ultra is faster, and only by a few FPS. This card runs my games at reasonable speed with all features maxed out. If only nvidia would get its act together on the drivers. There are many "issues" still with the G80 series cards, mostly with multimedia playback, which I don't make much use of. For gaming, it is a great single-card solution available right now. Buyers considering purchase of a DX10 card should be aware that Microsoft has just come out with DX 10.1. Current generation DX10 cards will not support DX10.1 extensions and APIs. How big a deal this is remains to be seen.
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