e-Geforce 7800GT 256MB PCIe VIVO

Introduction

Name: e-Geforce 7800GT 256MB PCIe VIVO

Date: 12th August 2005

Manufacturer: EVGA

Provided by: EVGA

Reviewed by: Umair “Thyhammerr” Rauf

Company Profile

Founded in 1999, EVGA has grown exponentially in the channel, serving the system builder, distribution and retail markets with products that offer the highest in quality and customer satisfaction, thereby making the computing experience transparent to the hardware in the box. EVGA only offers visual processing products based on NVIDIA chipsets and has recently expanded its product line to include motherboards.

Introduction

It’s been over a month now when NVIDIA announced their Geforce 7800GTX series but the price is still too high. NVIDIA yesterday introduced 7800GT boards. Similar to 7800GTX’s launch, the immediate availability of 7800GT cards worldwide haven’t surprised us. Basically there were paper launches before the card could really hit the streets but now, I guess, NVIDIA has changed their 6 months product cycle policy. EVGA, as always, introduced 7800GT and sent us a sample of their 7800GT series.

7800GTX works on 24 Pixel Pipeline and 8 Vertex Shader units while the 7800GT works on 20 Pixel Pipeline and 7 Vertex Shader Units. Obviously the card is inferior to 7800GTX but the price difference is worth considering. The 7800GTX currently costs around $542.00 and the 7800GT around $449.99, around $100 difference between their prices. The 7800GTX is truly a beast but 7800GT provides a great performance/price ratio to those who are neck and neck with their budget. People might be having trouble getting hold of 7800GTX due to their high price but if they really want some taste of the 7xxx series of NVIDIA, 7800GT is for them.

e-Geforce 7800GT at a glance

The EVGA 7800GT has a core clock of 445 MHz and a memory clock of 1070 MHz (effective). I’ve looked at some of NVIDIA’s reference 7800GT cards’ specifications and found out that the e-GeForce 7800GT is factory overclocked by 45 MHz (Core Clock) from 400 MHz and 70 MHz (memory clock effective) from 1000 MHz. A few weeks ago, EVGA reached out to their customers and asked them what they wanted, and I guess this explains it.

Like their 7800GTX series, the e-GeForce 7800GT also has a black custom face plate, a touch of uniqueness. The cooler with its black design really looks nice and those of us who favor black would really love it.

A really cool thing about the 7800 series of NVIDIA is that the whole card has been reworked from its pixel pipeline to its vertex shader unit, all to bring the highest level of performance and yield every ounce of graphics processing power it can. When we say the card is reworked, we mean that none of the past NVIDIA cards would’ve ever matched up to these.

The 7800 series also brought a new texture engine and a whole new set of features including OpenGL 2.0 support, CineFX 4.0, etc. Basically, we will study that ahead. In short, currently the 7800 series graphics cards are the best graphics cards in the world while NVIDIA is taking as much money as it can by having next-generation graphics adapters on the streets way before its competitors can. The R520 core is expected to release in September, as per my conversation with ATI.

Packaging / Contents

The e-GeForce 7800GT comes in an elegant packaging. It gives a somewhat professional look – like you’re buying a high-end software kit or something. The product package is see-through in the back so you can see what you’re buying. In some cases, the product box differs from the card inside. To be sure, you have to check both the box and the sticker on the card. This way you’ll be sure what you’re buying. The box is perfectly sealed to prevent any deception by any third person.

Product Contents

We were provided with the retail version of the 7800GT bundled with one of the best FPS games DICE ever made, Battlefield 2.

Following were provided:

• S-Video
• 2x DVI to VGA Connectors
• User’s guide
• Driver Installation Disk w/ trial software
• Power Director Pro ME
• Battlefield 2 PC-DVD
• VIVO Cable
• 2 EVGA Case Stickers
• 6 pin PCI-E Power Cable

The VIVO capability of the card is also a plus for all those into DVD and video recording. The user guide provides enough info on how to install the card and troubleshoot. The driver installation disk is equipped with Forceware 77.76 drivers. This card lacks direct VGA connectors as it has two DVI connectors (similar to the 7800GTX and other high-end cards); for that, 2 DVI to VGA connectors are supplied.

The addition of Battlefield 2 is really great since it is one of the best games that utilizes the power of the 7800 series. Seriously, an awesome addition.

Specifications / Features

Specifications:

Performance

• NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
• 445 MHz GPU
• 20 Pixel Pipelines
• 400 MHz RAMDAC

Memory

• 256 MB, 256 bit DDR3
• 1070 MHz (effective)
• 32 GB/s Memory Bandwidth

Interface

• PCI-E 16x
• DVI-I, DVI-I, VIVO

Resolution & Refresh

• 240 Hz Max Refresh Rate
• 2048 x 1536 x 32bit x 85 Hz Max Analog
• 1600 x 1200 Max Digital

Requirements

• Minimum of a 450 Watt power supply
• An available 6 pin PCI-E power connector (hard drive power dongle to PCI-E 6 pin adapter included with card)

Features:

NVIDIA® CineFX™ 4.0 Shading Architecture

Vertex Shaders

• Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
• Displacement mapping
• Geometry instancing
• Infinite length vertex programs

Pixel Shaders

• Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
• Full pixel branching support
• Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
• Infinite length pixel programs

Next-Generation Texture Engine

• Accelerated texture access
• Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
• Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
• Support for non-power of two textures
• Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
• DirectX and S3TC texture compression
• Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes

64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending

• Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
• Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
• Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
• Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and explosions

NVIDIA® Intellisample™ 4.0 Technology

• Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering (with up to 128 Taps)
• Blistering-fast antialiasing and compression performance
• Gamma-adjusted rotated-grid antialiasing removes jagged edges for incredible image quality
• Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling modes boost antialiasing quality to new levels
• Support for normal map compression
• Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at even higher resolutions and frame rates
• Fast z-clear

NVIDIA® UltraShadow™ II Technology

• Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games

NVIDIA® SLI™ Technology

• Patented hardware and software technology allows two GPUs to run in parallel to scale performance
• Scales performance on over 60 top PC games and applications

NVIDIA® PureVideo Technology

• Adaptable programmable video processor
• High-definition MPEG-2 and WMV9 hardware acceleration
• Spatial-temporal de-interlacing
• Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pull-down (Inverse Telecine)
• 4-tap horizontal, 5-tap vertical scaling
• Overlay color temperature correction
• Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full video quality and features in each window
• Integrated HDTV output

Composited Desktop Hardware Engine

• Video post-processing
• Real Time desktop compositing
• Accelerated antialiased text rendering
• Pixel shader driven special effects and animation

Advanced Display Functionality

• Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including 2048×1536 at 85Hz
• Dual DVO ports for interfacing to external TMDS transmitters and external TV encoders
• Full NVIDIA® nView® multi-display technology capability

API Support

• Complete DirectX support, including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0
• Full OpenGL support, including OpenGL 2.0

The Card

The card is similar to the 7800GTX in most ways. The cooling solution is a bit smaller but looks the same. In fact, it’s a one-slot solution. As far as the sound of the fan is concerned, at high speed, the fan is more silent than AMD’s stock cooler running at idle.

Thermal Aspect

Thermally, this one-card solution is effective. The card is clocked around 45 MHz (Engine Clock) and 70 MHz (Memory Engine Clock) higher than the reference card. Therefore, it requires decent cooling. As of now, this card holds the reference card’s cooling but with a custom face plate. The idle temperatures on this card stay around 53° to 54° Celsius, while at maximum load, the temperature jumps to 75°. It’s normal for this generation card to work at these temperatures.

Power Consumption

Heat dissipation is directly proportional to the power consumption of the card. High power consumption results in high temperature, so a good-grade cooling solution is required. A product that consumes low wattage would yield low heat energy. The most important thing the developers and designers had in mind was power consumption. Geforce 6800 Ultras used around 78 Watts, while X850 XT PE utilized around 71 Watts. Interestingly, NVIDIA succeeded in running the Geforce 7800GTX at 80W (defeating the 6800 Ultra by a big margin), while the 7800GT runs at around 60W at peak, which is impressive for this card.

Graphics Core

The card is based on the same graphics core as the 7800GTX but with 4 Pixel Pipelines locked and 1 Vertex Shader Unit locked, resulting in lower performance compared to the 7800GTX. The G70 core is not based on any previous NVIDIA model (that’s why G70 is a working name). It is a purely reworked graphics card with every pipeline redesigned from scratch to reduce latency and provide awesome graphics processing power.

PCB Design

The 7800GT’s PCB differs slightly from the 7800GTX’s. The power unit of the PCB and the surrounding area is far simpler and thus less expensive than that of the 7800GTX. Although we believe that any water cooling waterblock or heatsink solution for the 7800GTX would also work on the 7800GT.

Conclusion

This card sure is bang for the buck. With all the 7800GTX goodies, the card remains the second fastest in the world. Enhanced HDR capability makes it one of a kind. The price is excellent and, according to EVGA’s recent announcement, with every purchase of an EVGA 7800GTX or GT you get a $200 EVGA SLI Motherboard for free. If I wanted any card and had around a $429 budget, the 7800GT would be the card I would buy.

The overclocking feature of this card is still considerable, but I would love to see those pipes unlocked.

With SLI Feature, you can increase the performance of the 7800GT Card by 40%–60%, so all is not lost. As far as price is concerned, I believe buying a $429 7800GT is way better than buying a $445 6800 Ultra or $469 X850 XT PE.

The con of this series, however, is the CPU. You at least need a 3.2+ (EM64T, etc.) or AMD 3500+ to actually see the true performance. In short, both the 7800GTX and 7800GT are CPU dependent at resolutions like 1024×768. This doesn’t mean you’ll get some serious performance with either the X850 XT PE or 6800 Ultra; when we say the thing is CPU dependent, we mean that at some point the graphics can’t do anything more when you’re using a low-end processor with a high-end graphics card. A major problem might arise with those who own 15″–17″ LCDs. They don’t go over 1024×768 or 1280×1024, and at that point, I believe they have no choice but to sit on a tasty fruit cake. They can, however, turn up the AA and AF settings to 4x/6x or 8x/16x respectively to at least notice some serious eye candy at these resolutions.

In short, everything one looks for in a video card is present in this e-GeForce 7800GT.

Pros

• Great Bundle
• Factory Overclocked
• Overclocking
• Enhanced HDR Support
• SLI Feature
• Price
• Lifetime Warranty
• Custom Face Plate
• Limited Time only: SLI Motherboard for Free

Cons

• CPU Dependent (buy a good one)

Awards

Considering the performance/price ratio of this product, we believe this card receives our Award of Recommendation.