EVGA announces ACS3 line of 8800 cards

Author: Brett Thomas
Published: 9th January 2007
Comments (12) Stumble
The cooler design on the new ACS3 can run a stock 8800GTX 11 degrees cooler. But why would we run that at stock?

The cooler design on the new ACS3 can run a stock 8800GTX 11 degrees cooler. But why would we run that at stock?

We got a chance on Monday to sit down with the boys from EVGA to talk a bit about what's coming up in the year ahead. The company is releasing a couple new things to market, and they definitely look promising.

First up is the release of the updated 8800 GTX and GTS cards. As you may recall, there was quite a delay between board partners releasing the stock models and the very recent overclocked editions.

EVGA is now following suit with its ACS3 line, which is "over-specced" out of the box. The guys at EVGA were careful to not use the term overclock, as they don't much like the stigma to it. Instead, they prefer the term overspecced - the cards come with a patented cooler system designed in-house, which affords for a considerably higher speed at the same temperatures.

At stock speeds, the board runs about 11 degrees centegrade cooler, which has given quite a bit more headroom. We put some pictures of the behemoths below, though we'll look forward to getting some in our labs to have a crack at. The boards are available for sale as of this week for $599 USD (GTX) and $449 USD (GTS).

Discussion then turned to the upcoming NVIDIA 650i based motherboard, which will hopefully be hitting stores soon. The board follows the NVIDIA 680 line, but with a few less features - it features only four SATA ports and does not have native support for 1333MHz bus speeds. This means it's not going to work for the upcoming refresh of the Core 2 Duo line. We'll have to see whether or not this will affect the sales of motherboards with this chipset, which are targeted at the mid-range gamer.

What was probably most on our minds, but unfortunately went unsaid in all of our meetings today (EVGA included) was the expected release date of the upcoming mid-range parts of the NVIDIA 8xxx series. Though we received some unofficial rumour that we could see them appearing as early as "shortly before CeBit" (which is in March), the only official answer from all board partners we've talked to so far (including the boys at EVGA) is "soon...ish."

We'll be looking forward to getting our hands on these new products in the near future. How about you? Tell us your thoughts in our forums.

MSI Wind U100
Quote rupbert 9th January 2007, 17:17
Very nice.
Quote Mankz. 9th January 2007, 17:18
that cooler is huge!

looks pretty moody aswell.
Quote Hugo 9th January 2007, 17:58
At the risk of sounding a bit odd, they look fantastic
Quote aon`aTv.gsus666 9th January 2007, 19:49
Sexey! To be exact. :)
Quote Jodiuh 9th January 2007, 20:03
So can I "step-up" to this?
Quote DXR_13KE 9th January 2007, 20:31
nice looking..... lets hope that its not to noisy.... and if it rocks lets hope others imitate it.
Quote Reins 9th January 2007, 22:00
I love eVGA

If it's been with in 3 months you can step up I believe, they probably wont sell just the cooler though...
Quote eddtox 9th January 2007, 22:24
That card looks sooooooooo coool!! (No pun intended) It's probably one of the best looking graphics cards I have ever seen!

IMHO

-ed out
Quote DLoney 9th January 2007, 23:57
when will the 8800's go down in price!
:'(
Quote Da Dego 10th January 2007, 00:54
You can't step up to this model at the moment, sadly - however, I'm sure that will change shortly when more stock becomes available. Also, you need to have purchased your previous EVGA card within 90 days and have not used the step-up program before.
Quote Paradigm Shifter 10th January 2007, 10:48
I like the cooler - and those drops in temps are rather nice. From all reports, the 8800 at full load was hitting temps where I start getting nervous. (Like the X1900XT...)
Quote rupbert 10th January 2007, 10:58
Quote:
Originally Posted by Paradigm Shifter
I like the cooler - and those drops in temps are rather nice. From all reports, the 8800 at full load was hitting temps where I start getting nervous. (Like the X1900XT...)

Yeah 90c is serious.
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