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EVGA 8800GTX ACS3

TheOptimist

TheOptimist

TheOptimist

Associate
Joined
7 Oct 2008
Posts
16
Location
London, UK
Hi everyone,

I'm looking to pop another card in my machine and as I bought the EVGA 8800GTX ACS3 over a year ago I was hoping I'd be able to pick one up on the cheap now however it looks like it's discontinued! Just my luck!

At this stage I'm not in the market for a complete system upgrade but would I be better just buying a slightly better card than trying to hunt down another ACS3? Given my ASUS P5N32-E board (nForce 680i chipset) it will be another nVidia card at the moment.

I'm also thinking of going watercooling so if a new card it the recommended option it would need to be able to take a water block - I was hoping I'd be able to o/c the ACS3 card but having read a few of the forums here it appears that the card is already o/c'd to it's maximum :(

TheO

Oh, and first post, so be nice ;)
 
I was in a similar situation recently and decided to sell my 8800 ultra and buy a 1gb 4870. Got a decent price for my ultra and bought the 4870 on TWO so the upgrade didnt cost a lot at all and i have seen good gains in all my games.

Your acs3 gtx is a premium card and rare as you know and should fetch a decent price if someone is looking for that particular card to sli.

Does your card struggle to play the games you want at the res with aa/af that you want? If so i'd say sell it and get something else otherwise hold out for better tech in 6-9 months.

If you do decide to buy a new nvidia card now your looking at the 260 and 280 range of cards.
 
The ACS3 is a cracking card, i have one in my rig and theres no overclocking in it at all, as you say its already clocked to the max but it still plays everything perfectly well, including crysis warhead.

If youre wanting to go sli then you can pair it with any other 8800GTX it dosent have to be the evga :)
 
If you sli with a stock gtx your acs3 gtx will down clock to the speed of the other card if my memory is right.
 
JeffyB said:
If you sli with a stock gtx your acs3 gtx will down clock to the speed of the other card if my memory is right.
Click to expand...

Yes, but make sure the evga is in the lower slot as the speed the cards run at is determined by the card in the upper slot.
 
Thanks for all the responses - as usual this place is teeming with ace peeps who are willing to help out.

I was going to go for an nVidia card simply because the chipset was nVidia and I thought all the components would play nicer together...if the ATI cards are still a go I may go for them. Having read some of the comments the card still plays everything fine on my 24" Dell so it could be that there's no need to upgrade. I've got to pick up Crysis Warhead next week to try that out (and Assassins Creed) but CoH is excellent on the system so I'm assuming I'll be okay with both of those titles.

I was already waiting for Nehalem to properly settle down before upgrading so perhaps all I should do with my current system is pop some water cooling in.

Just on the off chance that someone reads this thread and has a spare ACS3 going, let me know - I'd be interested to SLI with that at a reasonable price. I could SLI with another GTX but I'm a little loathe to downclock the card I lovingly spent so much money on when it first came out :)

TheO
 
Well if you dont want to go SLi then an ATi card will be fine in that mobo, I had an ATi card, crappy 2900XT and it was no different performance wise in an Asus P5N-E SLi compared to a Gigabyte DS3-R that using the Intel P35 chipset compared to the 650i NV chipset in the P5N-E SLi.
 
The Asus P5N32-E does have three PCEe slots however only two are rated at x16. The other is an x1 slot that I presume was originally designed to take a PhysX card before all that got dumped into the GPU. I was under the impression that to get the best out of the 3-SLi configuration you'd need the slots all rated at the same speed - it would seem a little strange to have two cards running at x16 and one at x1; would I be getting the full potential out of the three cards :)

Having checked the OC store it claims that the board is Quad-SLi ready - something which Asus do as well on their website. Not really sure how you'd do this with only 3 PCIe slots on the board...anyone got any ideas on that one? :)
 
TheOptimist said:
The Asus P5N32-E does have three PCEe slots however only two are rated at x16. The other is an x1 slot that I presume was originally designed to take a PhysX card before all that got dumped into the GPU. I was under the impression that to get the best out of the 3-SLi configuration you'd need the slots all rated at the same speed - it would seem a little strange to have two cards running at x16 and one at x1; would I be getting the full potential out of the three cards :)

Having checked the OC store it claims that the board is Quad-SLi ready - something which Asus do as well on their website. Not really sure how you'd do this with only 3 PCIe slots on the board...anyone got any ideas on that one? :)
Click to expand...

2 are x16, the other is x8.

You can do quad SLi on any SLi mobo's, 2x 9800GX2.
 
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