Introduction:

EVGA has been in the video card market for quite some time now, and they have earned their stripes through providing the end user, pre-tested and overclocked video cards.

With the upcoming release of nVidia’s latest in March, we might see some interesting deals for previous generation products. EVGA has taken a vanilla 7800GTX 256Mb and supercharged it, increasing GPU and Memory clocks and constructing their own cooling device which promises excellent performance without “hair dryer” noise effects.

The 7800GTX 512Mb are still hard to be found, and with the ATI X1900 series overshadowing them price and performance wise, it would not be the smartest buy right now. Yields for the lower clocked 256Mb however seem to be pretty good. They are available at acceptable prices, and will turn any PC into a gaming monster machine.

The reference 7800GTX 256Mb from nVidia comes with 430Mhz GPU and 1.2Ghz memory clock. EVGA’s 7800GTX KO version has 490Mhz GPU and 1.3Ghz memory clocks; nVidia’s 7800GTX 512Mb does better with 550mhz GPU and 1.7ghz memory, the KO version of EVGA sits in the middle GPU clock wise.

At ~$480/€530 you do pay a premium over other 7800GTX cards, but you get a certified overclocked hand picked item, which is covered by a very extensive warranty. For US customers EVGA’s offers a life time warranty which covers even faulty BIOS flash, power surge and overclocking damage! The European warranty is less flexible and only lasts for 5 years, covering none physical damage to the card.



Main Features & Specifications:

• Powered by Nvidia Geforce 7800GTX @ 490Mhz (default 430Mhz)
• 256MB-256bit GDDR3 memory @ 1.3Ghz (default 1.2Ghz)
• Twenty-four parallel pixel pipelines
• PCI Express x16 Compatibility
• Intergrated Nvidia TV encoder
• Intergrated Nvidia ViVo
• Dual DVI-I Connectors
• Nvidia CineFX™ 4.0 Architecture
• 64-bit texture filtering and blending
• Nvidia Intellisample™ 4.0 Technology
• Nvidia UltraShadow™ II Technology
• SLI Multi-GPU Ready
• Nvidia PureVideo™ Technology
• DVD + HDTV Decode assist
• Intergrated Dual 400Mhz RAMDACs
• 1x Dual Link TMDS DVI Connector
• 1x Single Link TMDS DVI Connector
• Nvidia Digital Vibrance Control™ (DVC) 3.0
• Support for Microsoft© Video Mixer Renderer
• Advanced adaptive de-interlacing
• 5 YEAR WARRANTY (Europe)
• Life-Time WARRANTY (USA)

Let’s take a closer look at the card ->