XFX 7800 GT SLI Review

When video card shopping, many people look at a card's core and memory clock speeds, the included bundle of software and accessories, and the warranty among other things. More than ever before, NVIDIA's board partners are offering out-of-the-box, warrantied overclocks, so checking out clock speeds is worthwhile. More important to many consumers, though, is the warranty. XFX not only offers factory overclocked cards, but it also offers an exclusive Double Lifetime Warranty on 6 and 7 Series cards. The company also packs in some nice bundles with its cards.

All of these factors add up to a great offering, but they don't mean much if the cards don't perform as expected. In this review, I'll be taking a look at the XFX GeForce 7800 GT. On the surface, this looks like a very promising package -- factory overclock to 450MHz / 1050MHz, Double Lifetime Warranty and a nice bundle with three full games. Let's dive in and see if XFX's 7800 GT is as good at the core as it seems at first glance.

Features

• Powered by NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT VPU
• Supports PCI Express and 20 pipelines
• Integrated with 256MB GDDR3 memory and 256-bit memory interface
• Supports HDTV function and HDTV cable enclosed
• Supports VIVO function for video editing
• 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

• Model Number: PV-T70G-UDF7
• Engine Clock: 450MHz (Factory Overclock)
• Memory Clock: 1.05GHz (Factory Overclock)
• Chipset: GeForce 7800 GT
• Memory: 256MB
• Memory Type: DDR3
• Memory Bus: 256-bit

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 reference GT's core clock is 30MHz slower than the GTX, and its memory clock is 100MHz (200MHz effective) slower. XFX didn't settle for 400MHz on the core, though. The company boosted it to a healthy 450MHz. The memory doesn't get that big of a boost as it is only overclocked by 25MHz (50MHz effective). 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.