NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512 Preview

Although the GeForce 7 Series has been very successful so far, we all knew NVIDIA was keeping something up its sleeve to respond to ATI's 512MB Radeon X1800 XT. Many of you probably already know the name of NVIDIA's response (a.k.a. NVIDIA's new flagship card) and might even know what it looks like. Well, today is the official day that we can tell you all about it. Get ready for another hard launch as NVIDIA continues the trend it started to end paper launches, and say hello to the GeForce 7800 GTX 512.

This card is using the same core design of the original 256MB 7800 GTX, but it has 512MB of GDDR3 and is running at higher clock speeds thanks to a PCB redesign, new cooling solution and new higher speed RAM. NVIDIA set the reference clock speeds for the GTX 512 to 550MHz for the core and 1.7GHz for the memory (effective), which is quite a jump up from the original GTX's 430MHz core and 1.2GHz memory.

As I already mentioned, the 512MB GTX is NVIDIA's answer to ATI's X1800 XT. The interesting thing is this card is rumored to have been almost ready to go at the initial 7800 GTX launch, but it was not launched since the 7800 GTX was more than enough to hold the performance crown over the competition. You will notice that the cooler being used is the same design as that used on the Quadro 4xxx cards.

We were fortunate enough to get ahold of two reference 7800 GTX 512 cards for SLI testing, which Scott performed on a new SLI X16 motherboard. Additionally, the XFX 7800 GTX 512 we received two days ago proves the hard launch claim, and we'll take a brief look at that card as well.

The features for the 512MB 7800 GTX are the same as those for the original 256MB GTX. So, let's just skip to a quick look at the specifications of the reference 7800 GTX 512 and the XFX 7800 GTX 512 XXX Edition. XFX introduced the "XXX Edition" moniker with the recent release of its 6800 GS. The XFX 6800 GS press release has this to say about XXX:

"Products marked with the label XXX have a new level of graphics performance and experience. During selection of the components, the absolute top is being separated from the masses, including the GPU’s. During the production, only the best yield [top 10%] has been selected to go forward into the XXX production. During this extensive tuning process, the products are being pushed to the max and then made ready for the assembly process. This is why we have called this level of graphics cards eXtreme, eXtreme and eXtreme again, visualized into the ‘XXX’ logo. The three X’s stand for eXtreme overclocking, eXtreme performance and eXtreme cooling."

If XFX's offering is any indication, and surely it is, the factory overclock trend will apparently continue into this launch. XFX has bumped both clocks by 30MHz, as you can see in the comparison table below.