Introduction

With NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GTX the only high-end solution on the market right now, NVIDIA’s board partners are under lots of pressure to move their 7800 GTX cards. Initially board manufacturers relied on availability to help them sell boards, with early adopters quickly purchasing any GeForce 7800 GTX card they could get their hands on, regardless of the manufacturer. But now with multiple board partners cranking out 7800 GTX boards there are dozens of cards to choose from.

As a result of this, manufacturers are increasingly turning to new ways to help distinguish themselves from each other.

Some are relying solely on price, striving to produce the least expensive 7800 GTX card possible in order to sell it at the lowest feasible price. The MSI and EVGA cards we’ve reviewed previously are two examples of this.

EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX KO ACS3 (top) and NVIDIA reference 7800 GTX (bottom)

The EVGA KO ACS3 compared to NVIDIA reference GeForce 6800 GT

Other board manufacturers have decided to tinker with the 7800 GTX’s clock speeds, overclocking the graphics core and/or memory on their 7800 GTX card in order to appeal to enthusiasts who are striving to get the most performance for their money. The end result has led to a clock speed war among the various card manufacturers, with each striving to outdo the other. BFG, EVGA, and XFX were among the first to duke it out amongst each other, but now ASUS, Gigabyte, and Leadtek (via a downloadable BIOS) are getting into the clock speed game. The result? More choices for consumers!

Now EVGA has decided to up the ante a little bit more, producing a card that’s not only overclocked higher than their previous 7800 GTX offering, it’s also got a new cooling unit. The end result is a product that EVGA hopes will deliver a knockout punch to the competition: the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX KO ACS³.

EVGA KO ACS3 meets its predecessor, the vanilla e-GeForce 7800 GTX

Closer shot of the 7800 GTX cards

First impressions

First things first, the e-GeForce 7800 GTX KO ACS³ is still built on the same reference design as every other GeForce 7800 GTX card on the market. EVGA hasn’t magically figured out a way to produce a better board design than NVIDIA, nor have they determined a way to overclock their board any differently than anyone else. Instead what they feel they have done is design a better cooling solution, dubbed ACS³.

Similar board designs

ACS³, short for Asymmetric Cooling System³ relies on largely the same cooling solution as NVIDIA’s stock cooler, only EVGA has come up with a few ways to enhance NVIDIA’s basic design, such as swapping out the stock aluminum heatsink for a copper one, and implementing a more robust ducting system with active cooling to help keep the entire graphics card cool, rather than just the GPU.

We’re not going to get into the politics of ACS³ or any of its predecessors, instead we’re here today to evaluate just how effective the new cooler is at keeping the 7800 GTX GPU cool, as well as the performance of EVGA’s supercharged card in general. As we mentioned in our Sneak Peek article earlier this month, ACS³’s design isn’t revolutionary, in fact a lot of the concepts found on ACS³ have been used in the past on GeForce FX cards from multiple manufacturers. Instead, what EVGA has done is integrate these concepts onto a 7800 GTX card before their competitors, and with a snazzy design and higher clock speeds to boot!