Gigabyte GeForce 7800 GT (GV-NX78T256V-B) Review

When NVIDIA introduced us to the 7 Series GPUs with its current flagship GeForce 7800 GTX, we were quite impressed. Most people, though, aren't going to buy flagship hardware, so they wait for the little brothers of the flagship. Currently, the only "little brother" released has been the 7800 GT.

A quick look at the specifications reveals that the 7800 GT is a slightly crippled 7800 GTX, which actually is not a bad thing if you are a 7800 GT. Although the GT has less power under the hood, it still performs quite well when compared to the GTX. Follow along and keep reading to learn about the first retail GT offering to hit our test benches - the Gigabyte GV-NX78T256V-B.

• Powered by NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT VPU
• Supports PCI Express and 20 pipelines
• Integrated with the industry's best 256MB GDDR3 memory and 256-bit memory interface
• Supports HDTV function and HDTV cable enclosed
• Supports VIVO function for video editing
• GIGABYTE's Turbo Force Edition guarantee
• NVIDIA SLI Ready
• NVIDIA CineFX 4.0 engine
• Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 support
• 64-bit texture filtering and blending
• NVIDIA Intellisample 4.0 technology
• NVIDIA PureVideo technology
• NVIDIA ForceWare Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
• NVIDIA nView multi-display technology
• OpenGL 2.0 support
• Dual DVI-I, TV-Out and D-Sub (by adapter)

Specifications

While the 7800 GTX boasts 24 pixel pipelines and eight vertex shading units, the 7800 GT features 20 pixel pipes and seven vertex units. Additionally, the GT's core clock is 30MHz slower than the GTX, and its memory clock is 100MHz (200MHz effective) slower. On the positive side of things, the GT has a lower peak power consumption than the GTX (15W less to be exact). The GT's peak power consumption is 85W.