Any one ever heard of a GF3 A3?

[SithSolo1]

If so, is it good or not?

 

[Serori]

If you're talkin about the stepping of the core, A3 is the "early" GF3. While there really isnt a difference between the old stepping, A3, and the new, A5 in performance there is in OCing. If you want to OC make sure you get an A5 core. A3's don't respond very well if at all to overclocking.

 

[SithSolo1]

So A3 has no problems besides OCing?

is it worth $300?

 

[Brian48]

No, because there shouldn't be any A3's. The new nVidia reference specs at A5 and above. If you happen to find a card with an actual A3 chip, more than likely it's a preproduction board or some crap slapped together from a shady dealer who gets his parts from dubious places.

By the way, many of the software utilities out there like Wcpuid and Sandra (maybe) incorrectly identify the A5 rev chip as A3. So if you happen to read of someone who has an A3 rev chip on a retail board, they are incorrect. You need to remove the heatsink in order to see the actual revision number.

 

[Rand]

The A3 was one of the early GF3 cores, it performs pretty much exactly the same as that latter cores though it was known to be an extremely poor overclocker.

All of the release GF3 cards are supposed to be A5 stepping or later, however a few A3 stepping cores made it into some of the earliest GF3's to hit the market.