nVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX Preview

INTRODUCTION
 

Looking back, the video card race between NVIDIA and ATI has usually meant a new chip once a year and a refresh once every six or so months. Usually the refresh has been the same chip with some minor tweaks and increased clock speeds when they’ve gotten better yields out of the design over time. Those of you who follow the industry however might have noticed that since NVIDIA released the first GeForce 6 cards in spring 2004 there haven’t been any refresh-products coming out. Instead NVIDIA choose to release SLI-support on their motherboards. It is easy thus to think that the new GeForce 7 chips are nothing more than a refresh product. As the name suggests though this isn’t the case. The GeForce 7 is a new chip with improvements beyond mere increased clockspeed.

No Paper Launch

We’ve all experienced them – the paper launches. Both NVIDIA and ATI have been guilty of doing this and us consumers are the ones who have been paying the price having to wait for weeks and even months for products that never seem to arrive.

This time NVIDIA has worked hard to ensure that the OEM’s have cards out to sell on the day of the launch. They even sold cards at the NVIDIA launch party that was held yesterday night. So if you feel the need to get a card using the GeForce 7800 GTX head online now and order it. It should be available in most places (although we of course do not know how good supply there is).

We’ve got one!!

While we got briefed on this product last Friday we unfortunately didn’t get access to a reference board. However Leadtek came to our rescue and Isaac at Leadtek got the ok to send us one ahead of time. Thus we now have a retail Leadtek WinFast 7800 GTX TDH MyVIVO (phew) which we of course will write a full review of in a not to distant future.

Our own GeForce 7800 GTX!

Thanks to Leadtek!

Unfortunately the card arrived on the 21st meaning Scott only had about 3 hours to test it before he had to get to work so this preview will contain our preliminary benchmarks as well as comparisons with one and two 6800GT’s in single and SLI-mode.

The GeForce 6800 GT (top) and the GeForce 7800 GTX (below)

The MSRP for this card is $599.00 US but it might get even higher if the demand is high and supply is low.