GeForce 3 availability

In our exhaustive GeForce 3 review, we mentioned in passing that availability from store to store was a bit dicey. Well, it's taken long enough, but it finally looks as though after initial Leadtek imports circulated through overclocking channels, ELSA, ASUS, Hercules (Guillemot) and a number of other vendors are finally shipping the cards to retail with release drivers (allegedly the same as NVIDIA Experimental Driver version 12.00). Dabs.com has most cards listed, but has done so for some time, and according to customer services representatives isn't capable of fulfilling orders on ELSA or ASUS cards for at least a week. The stock situation on ELSA cards may be quite dire in fact, as rival Insight are also claiming that they don't have stock, and won't until the 5th June. EuroGamer fans Overclockers UK [Hi Mark - Ed] do have stock of Hercules 3D Prophet III cards though, with a cool blue PCB, but a fiery £390 price tag. The cheapest bet seems to be ELSA's card, at £299 in many places, which in fairness to them is what most GeForce 2 GTS cards debuted at. The same was true of GeForce 2 Ultras, as well. In retail channels, the GeForce 3 is a prized commodity right now. According to a source at a major hardware distributor, wholesalers have several brands of GeForce 3 available, with ASUS cards in the largest quantities. On a related note, a good archive of NVIDIA drivers that we discovered this weekend is Blarg Overclocking, with everything from the earliest (5.22) official TNT2 drivers to the very latest GeForce 3-compatible releases (12.20). Also included is the Coolbits registry hack that enables the overclocking panel of the NVIDIA control applet. Highly recommended, and if you find your GF3's 4xFSAA is slowing you down, quite useful for stealing a few more FPS. Related Feature - GeForce 3 Review