The GeForce3's entrance into the market was closely watched by every gamer. Just what did NVIDIA's latest product offer to one up their GeForce2 series of chip?  Was it really worth 500 hard-earned dollars? What about the huge delay from NVIDIA's announcement and the handful of previews (such as our own) to the product actually being available to consumers? Lastly, who could forget the A3 and A5 stepping issue? It's easy to see that the GeForce3 has had quite a colorful past few months, and the future seems just as conflict filled with the arrival of ATI's Direct X 8.1 counterpart, the Radeon 8500 as well as NVIDIA's own performance enhancing Detonator 4 drivers.

The GeForce3 has has many features that separate it from the current crop of cards available. With more pixel and texture pipelines than any other graphics chip as well as several bandwidth saving techniques, the GeForce3 offers the highest level of performance available to consumers. Here's a quick run down of it's features:

Please use Mike's extensive preview and additions to learn more about the GeForce3. It is by far the most complete overlook of the GeForce3 available.

Visiontek, Asus, Leadtek and Elsa all had their GeForce3 based  cards available for quite some time. It's only been a couple months that we've seen other manufacturers begin to offer their own GF3 based products.

eVGA began offering the E-GeForce3 in June with an astonishing pre-order deal entitled the Step-Up promotion. For a paltry 350 dollars, they were offering their GeForce3 based product with an enticing goodie; they would replace your e-GeForce3 with NVIDIA's next-generation product once it would become available and they would only charge you the difference in price between the e-GeForce3 and it's successor. This promotion would allow you to order the GF3 now and take advantage of all it's offers, and then get the evolutionary step up for a paltry difference in price, saving you 350 dollars off the full price of the second . Awesome by any standard!

With the performance of every GeForce3 available varying only slightly between manufacturers, each must stride to set themselves apart from the rest of the pack.  Asus' card features a huge GPU/RAM cooler as well as being the only card that has slightly deviated from NVIDIA's reference design. Hercules' card features an Orb-style cooler and a unique blue PCB. OCZ tech includes copper RAM sinks and better 2D filters while Absolute has an awesome games bundle. eVGA sets themselves apart by their unique patented ADM installation suite. This type of software has been in development for some time and has been needed by many for even longer. It allows easy plug and play installation and upgrade for every Windows based PC.

Next Page: Installation...