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Despite what the big two in the graphics world may say or think, the majority of people still own a system based around an AGP graphics card.
Furthermore, most are reluctant to shell out for a new motherboard, processor and memory just to get PCI Express graphics performance.
Needless to say with the push to get everyone and their dog to use PCI Express, AGP users have been left out in the cold lately.
However, Nvidia has suddenly remembered AGP still has a part to play and brought out the Geforce 7800GS, its new flagship for the AGP platform.
Nvidia has made some changes to the mighty G70 core to bring it to AGP users.
Because it's natively a PCI Express chip, an extra high speed interconnect chip has been added to the board to allow it to speak to the AGP interface.
The number of vertex shaders drops from the 7800GTX's eight to six, while the new 7800GS has only 16 pixel pipelines.
The standard 7800GS comes with 256MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 600MHz (1.2GHz effective) and a core clock of 375MHz.
However, the EVGA board we have here is a little different. As the name suggests, it's been tweaked.
Although based on the reference design, the core and memory speeds are far from reference and the card lives up to its Superclocked name.
Instead of the standard rather mundane core speed, the Superclocked runs at a very impressive 460MHz (85MHz faster than the reference design) while the memory has been tweaked up to a blistering 675MHz (1.35GHz effective). Impressively, all this is done with the reference single slot cooling solution.
In ours tests, it notched up 6,299 in 3Dmark05 - the fastest 3Dmark05 AGP results we've seen and only just behind the 7,345 achieved by EVGA's 7800GT PCI Express version. See the full results here.
Although this card isn't currently available in the UK, we're expecting stores to be stocking it soon.
Amazingly, it's going to be priced around the £160 mark, which is tremendous value for money.
See also:
Graphics technology, SLI and Crossfire explained, plus see full results for over 80 cards 15 Feb 2006
A supremely fast graphics card from ATI - Nvidia's response is eagerly awaited 24 Jan 2006
One of the fastest AGP cards we've seen, and with slim cooling 22 Nov 2005
Upgrading your graphics card can make the world of difference to your PC's performance. We look at some of the key things to consider before making a purchase 15 Feb 2006All Graphics Cards
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