Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 stars3D numbers were great, 2D numbers needed some explaining
Reviewed in the United States on October 8, 2012
Short review- the card is fantastic so buy it.
Long review goes like this: The only negative thing to say is the PASSMARK performance numbers posted by this card for 2D are pretty bad, however, it seems that the reason for this is that Windows 7 has a new 2D rendering strategy wrt to RAM and video card memory that intersects in an unfortunate way the rather strange *NOT double buffered* PASSMARK 2D test.
About that test, I would say PASSMARK is a bit unrealistic in measuring unbuffered performance since all 2D programs use double buffering to blit their graphics to the screen (if I've lost you, then you can ignore what follows and just go find your credit card to buy this really excellent card). PASSMARK in this benchmark acts like programs use direct rendering to the screen, which is just not the case and hasn't been for a long time AFAIK.
But mostly, out of 100s of possible GDI functions which are available to be hardware accelerated on a video card, Windows 7 accelerates only six ! - BitBlt, ColorFill, StretchBlt, AlphaBlend, Cleartype fonts & TransparentBlt- a criminal state of affairs on the part of Microsoft and what is mostly respoonsible for the bad PASSMARK numbers- the CPU is doing all the heavy lifting and not the card! I have an very very very fast 8-core CPU and I can tell you, you're much better off having the CUDA cores on the video card doing the processing....
So if you're using Windows 7 and benchmarking with PASSMARK, virtually any card will give you very mediocre results in the PASSMARK 2D scoring category. My advice- ignore it, it may not mean what it appears to mean and there's nothing you can do about it anyway.
The 3D performance of this card is outstanding, especially given the very modest price- cards go to 800 bucks and more. The build of the card and connectors and even the packaging on the card are confidence inspiring; for instance the double DVI heads in the card are very sturdy and don't sag at all under the weighty DVI connectors and thick, sagging monitor cords attached to them. The card itself is housed in a fancy (to me) plastic housing and needs its own power supply from your MB. It has a fan built into the housing that keeps things nice and cool according to my temp sensors.
Really, this is a great purchase even for most gamers and if you're value shopping for a high end card, this is probably the best price-performance ratio you're going to find with 2 DVI heads.
One more thing is EVGA is an OUTSTANDING company to try to get support from. People love this company because of their after-purchase customer support. That was probably 80% of the reason I went with an EVGA card in the first place.
My verdict is- buy with confidence, you won't be disappointed unless you're looking for some level of performance that isn't to be had at the sub $350 dollar price point, in which case you know a lot more about graphics cards and what you need than I do and aren't likely to be reading the reviews on this card anyway.
