XFX GeForce 7800 GTX 512 XXX Edition Review

NVIDIA is on one heck of a good streak lately. With its 7 Series cards and SLI, NVIDIA was the undisputed gaming performance leader for months. Then, ATI finally released its X1800 XT, a 512MB powerhouse, and NVIDIA lost the lead in many games. Not to worry, though, NVIDIA fans. NVIDIA had its response ready and waiting to pounce. That response is the GeForce 7800 GTX 512, which we recently covered in a preview article.

In that preview article, I talked about the XFX GeForce 7800 GTX 512 XXX Edition graphics card. Today, it's time to take a closer look at that card as promised. Those three letters ("XXX") might already have your head in the gutter, but here's what XFX wants you to know about its XXX Edition cards.

"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."

So, let's get to the review of this awesome new card.

The 7800 GTX 512 is based off 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. For its 7800 GTX 512 XXX Edition, XFX factory overclocks both the core and memory by 30MHz (which makes them 580MHz and 1.73GHz, respectively).

Features

• Next-generation superscalar GPU architecture
• 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
• 2 x DVI-I and TV-Out connectors
• XFX Exclusive Double Lifetime Warranty (USA & Canada only)
• Factory overclock

Specifications