Gigabyte NX78X256V-B

This is one of the first graphics cards to use the Geforce 7800 GTX architecture, Nvidia's latest salvo in its battle against ATI.

The NX78X256V-B doesn't look very different to its 6800-series predecessor, but the graphics processing unit runs just 30MHz faster and the 100MHz increase in effective memory speed offers a 3.2Gbytes/sec increase in bandwidth.

Nvidia has added 80 million transistors without increasing the power requirement. The 7800 GTX also runs far quieter during non-intensive applications and occupies a single PCI Express card slot.

Other improvements include an increase in the number of pixel pipelines from 16 to 24, and vertex pipelines from six to eight. This gives the 7800 GTX the potential to process 50 per cent more pixels per clock cycle, and a far higher texture fill rate than previous Geforce cards.

All this equates to impressive performance. The 3Dmark05 result of 7,497 is the highest we've seen. At a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200, with 4x anti aliasing and 4x anisotropic filtering, the Far Cry score was 57.64fps. This is comparable to the results achieved by a pair of Geforce 6800 Ultras using a Serial Link Interface (SLI).

However, a single 7800 GTX is much less impressive in more graphically intensive games, where it can lag behind a pair of SLI 6800 Ultras by up to 20fps. As expected, the 7800 GTX can be used in an SLI configuration.

At just £60 more than a 6800 Ultra, this is great for gamers.

See also:

XFX GeForce 6600 GT

A graphics cards aimed at gamers  16 Jun 2005

HIS Radeon X700Pro IceQII Turbo

Another graphics card that stands out from the crowd  05 Apr 2005

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