Introduction
Name: e-Geforce 7800GT 256MB PCIe VIVO
Date: 12th August 2005
Manufacturer: EVGA
Provided by: EVGA
Reviewed by: Umair “Thyhammerr” Rauf
Company Profile:
Founded in 1999, EVGA has grown exponentially in the channel, serving the system builder, distribution and retail markets with products that offer the highest in quality and customer satisfaction, thereby making the computing experience transparent to the hardware in the box. EVGA only offers visual processing products based on NVIDIA chipsets and has recently expanded its product line to include motherboards.
Introduction:
It’s been over a month now when NVIDIA announced their Geforce 7800GTX series but the price is still too high. NVIDIA yesterday introduced 7800GT boards. Similar to 7800GTX’s launch, the immediate availability of 7800GT cards worldwide haven’t surprised us. Basically there were paper launches before the card could really hit the streets but now, i guess, NVIDIA has changed their 6 months product cycle policy. EVGA, as always, introduced 7800GT and sent us a sample of their 7800GT series.
7800GTX works on 24 Pixel Pipeline and 8 Vertex Shader units while the 7800GT works on 20 Pixel Pipeline and 7 Vertex Shader Units. Obviously the card is inferior to 7800GTX but the price is difference is worth considering. The 7800GTX currently costs around $542.00 and the 7800GT around $449.99, around $100 difference between their prices. The 7800GTX is truly a beast but 7800GT provides great performance/price ratio to those who are neck to neck with their budget. People might be having trouble getting hold of 7800GTX due to their high price but if they really want some taste of 7xxx series of NVIDIA, 7800GT is for them.
e-Geforce 7800GT at a glance
e-GeForce 7800GT at a glance:
The EVGA 7800GT has a core clock of 445 MHz and a memory clock of 1070 Mhz (effective). I’ve looked at some NVIDIA’s reference 7800GT Cards’ specifications and found out that the e-GeForce 7800GT is factory overclocked by 45MHz Core Clock from 400MHz and 70MHz memory clock (effective) from 1000MHz. Few weeks ago EVGA reached out to their customers and asked them what they want and I guess this explains it.
Like their 7800GTX series, the e-GeForce 7800GT also have a black custom face plate, a touch of uniqueness. The cooler with black design really looks nice and those of us having black shade as their favorite would really love it.
A really cool thing about 7800 series of NVIDIA is that the whole card has been reworked from its pixel pipeline to vertex shader unit, all to bring the highest level of performance and to yield every ounce of graphics processing power it could yield. So when we say the card is reworked, we mean that none of past nvidia cards would’ve ever matchup to these.
7800 series also brought a new texture engine and whole new set of features including OpenGL 2.0 support, CineFX 4.0 and ect. Basically we will study that ahead. In short, currently the 7800 Series graphics card are the best graphics card in the world while NVIDIA is taking as much money as it can by having next generation graphics adapter on the streets way before its competitors can. The R520 core is expected to release in September, as per my conversation with ATI.
e-Geforce 7800GT at a glance
e-GeForce 7800GT at a glance:
The EVGA 7800GT has a core clock of 445 MHz and a memory clock of 1070 Mhz (effective). I’ve looked at some NVIDIA’s reference 7800GT Cards’ specifications and found out that the e-GeForce 7800GT is factory overclocked by 45MHz Core Clock from 400MHz and 70MHz memory clock (effective) from 1000MHz. Few weeks ago EVGA reached out to their customers and asked them what they want and I guess this explains it.
Like their 7800GTX series, the e-GeForce 7800GT also have a black custom face plate, a touch of uniqueness. The cooler with black design really looks nice and those of us having black shade as their favorite would really love it.
A really cool thing about 7800 series of NVIDIA is that the whole card has been reworked from its pixel pipeline to vertex shader unit, all to bring the highest level of performance and to yield every ounce of graphics processing power it could yield. So when we say the card is reworked, we mean that none of past nvidia cards would’ve ever matchup to these.
7800 series also brought a new texture engine and whole new set of features including OpenGL 2.0 support, CineFX 4.0 and ect. Basically we will study that ahead. In short, currently the 7800 Series graphics card are the best graphics card in the world while NVIDIA is taking as much money as it can by having next generation graphics adapter on the streets way before its competitors can. The R520 core is expected to release in September, as per my conversation with ATI.
Packaging / Contents
Packaging:
The e-GeForce 7800GT comes in an elegant packaging. It gives some what professional look. Looks like you’re buying a highend software kit or something. Anyway, the product package is a see through in the back so you can see what you’re buying. In some cases, the product box differs from the card inside. To be sure, you have to check with the box and the sticker on the card. This way you’ll be sure what you’re buying. The box is perfectly sealed to prevent any deception by any third person.
Product Contents:
We were provided with the retail version of 7800GT bundled with one of the best FPS Games DICE ever made, Battlefield 2.
Following were provided:
- S-Video
- 2x DVI to VGA Connectors
- User’s guide
- Driver Installation Disk w/ trial software
- Power Director Pro ME
- Battlefield 2 PC-DVD
- VIVO Cable
- 2 EVGA Case Stickers
- 6 pin PCI-E Power Cable
The VIVO capability of the card is also a plus for all those DVD and Video Recording people. The user guide provides enough info on how to install the card and troubleshoots. Driver installation disk is equipped with forceware 77.76 drivers. This card lacks direct VGA connectors as it has two DVI connectors, similar to 7800GTX and any other highend cards. for that 2 DVI to VGA Connectors are supplied.
The addition of Battlefield 2 is really great since this one of the best games that utilizes the 7800 series’ power. Seriously an awesome addition.
Specifications / Features
Specifications:
Performance
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
445 MHz GPU
20 Pixel Pipelines
400 MHz RAMDAC
Memory
256 MB, 256 bit DDR3
1070 MHz (effective)
32 GB/s Memory Bandwidth
Interface
PCI-E 16x
DVI-I, DVI-I, VIVO
Resolution & Refresh
240 Hz Max Refresh Rate
2048 x 1536 x 32bit x 85 Hz Max Analog
1600 x 1200 Max Digital
Requirements
Minimum of a 450 Watt power supply.
An available 6 pin PCI-E power connector (hard drive power dongle to PCI-E 6 pin adapter included with card).
| 6800GT | 6800Ultra | 7800GT | EVGA GeForce 7800GT | 7800GTX | |
| Code | NV40GT | NV40U | G71 | G70 | G70 |
| Core Clock | 350MHz | 400MHz | 400MHz | 445MHz | 430MHz |
| Memory | 256MB GDDR3 | ||||
| Memory Bus | 256 Bit | ||||
| Pipelines | 16 | 16 | 20 | 20 | 24 |
| Memory Clock | 1GHz | 1.2GHz | 1GHz | 1.07GHz | 1.2GHz |
| OpenGL | 1.5 | ||||
| DirectX | 9.0c | ||||
| Transistor Count | 222 Million | 302 Million | |||
| SM 2.0 / SM3.0 | SM 3.0 | ||||
Features:
NVIDIA® CineFX™ 4.0 Shading Architecture
- Vertex Shaders
° Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Vertex Shader 3.0
° Displacement mapping
° Geometry instancing
° Infinite length vertex programs
- Pixel Shaders
° Support for DirectX 9.0 Pixel Shader 3.0
° Full pixel branching support
° Support for Multiple Render Targets (MRTs)
° Infinite length pixel programs
- Next-Generation Texture Engine
° Accelerated texture access
° Up to 16 textures per rendering pass
° Support for 16-bit floating point format and 32-bit floating point format
° Support for non-power of two textures
° Support for sRGB texture format for gamma textures
° DirectX and S3TC texture compression - Full 128-bit studio-quality floating point precision through the entire rendering pipeline
with native hardware support for 32bpp, 64bpp, and 128bpp rendering modes
- 64-Bit Texture Filtering and Blending
• Full floating point support throughout entire pipeline
• Floating point filtering improves the quality of images in motion
• Floating point texturing drives new levels of clarity and image detail
• Floating point frame buffer blending gives detail to special effects like motion blur and
explosions
- NVIDIA® Intellisample™ 4.0 Technology
• Advanced 16x anisotropic filtering (with up to 128 Taps)
• Blistering- fast antialiasing and compression performance
• Gamma-adjusted rotated- grid antialiasing removes jagged edges for incredible image
quality
• Transparent multisampling and transparent supersampling modes boost antialiasing
quality to new levels
• Support for normal map compression
• Support for advanced lossless compression algorithms for color, texture, and z-data at
even higher resolutions and frame rates
• Fast z-clear
- NVIDIA® UltraShadow™ II Technology
• Designed to enhance the performance of shadow-intensive games
- NVIDIA® SLI™ Technology
• Patented hardware and software technology allows two GPUs to run in parallel to scale
performance
• Scales performance on over 60 top PC games and applications
- NVIDIA® PureVideo Technology
• Adaptable programmable video processor
• High-definition MPEG-2 and WMV9 hardware acceleration
• Spatial-temporal de- interlacing
• Inverse 2:2 and 3:2 pull-down (Inverse Telecine)
• 4-tap horizontal, 5-tap vertical scaling
• Overlay color temperature correction
• Microsoft® Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) supports multiple video windows with full
video quality and features in each window
• Integrated HDTV output
- Composited Desktop Hardware Engine
• Video post-processing
• Real Time desktop compositing
• Accelerated antialiased text rendering
• Pixel shader driven special effects and animation
Advanced Display Functionality
• Dual integrated 400MHz RAMDACs for display resolutions up to and including
2048×1536 at 85Hz
• Dual DVO ports for interfacing to externa l TMDS transmitters and external TV
encoders
• Full NVIDIA® nView® multi-display technology capability
- API Support
• Complete DirectX support, including the latest version of Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader
Model 3.0
• Full OpenGL support, including OpenGL 2.0
The Card
The Card:
The Card is similar to 7800GTX in most ways. The cooling solution is a bit smaller but looks same. In fact it’s one slot solution. As far as the sound of the fan is concerned, at high speed, the fan is more silent then AMD’s stock cooler running at Idle.
Thermal Aspect:
Thermally, this one card solution is effective. The card is clocked around 45MHz (Engine Clock) and 70MHz (Memory Engine Clock) higher then the reference card. Therefore it requires a decent cooling. As of now, this card holds reference card’s cooling but with custom face plate. The Idle temperatures on this card stays around 53 Deg Celsius to 54 Deg Celsius, While at maximum load, the temperature jumps to 75 Deg. Its normal for this generation card to work at these temps.
Power Consumption:
Heat Dissipation is directly proportional to power consumption of the card. It means that high power consumption results in high temperature. Therefore a need for good grade cooling solution is required. So a product that consumes low wattage would yield low heat energy. The most important thing developers and designer of this graphics card had in mind was the power consumption. Geforce 6800 Ultras used around 78 Watts power while X850 XT PE utilized around 71 W. Interestingly, NVIDIA succeeded in running the Geforce 7800GTX, which defeats the 6800 Ultra by a big margin, at 80W while the 7800GT runs at around 60W at peak. Which is impressive for this card.
Graphics Core:
The card is based on same graphics core as 7800GTX is but with 4 Pixel Pipelines locked and 1 Vertex Shader Unit locked, while this result in lower performance as compared to 7800GTX. Let’s talk about G70 shall we? The G70 core is not based on any previous NVIDIA model (that’s why G70 working name and not NV I think). The G70 is purely reworked graphics card with every pipeline reworked and made from scratch to reduce latency and provide awesome graphics processing power.
PCB Design:
The 7800GT’s PCB differs slightly from 7800GTX’s. The power unit of the PCB and the surrounding area of the graphics card is far simpler and thus inexpensive then 7800GTX. Although we believe that any Water Cooling waterblock or heatsink solution for 7800GTX would also work on 7800GT.
Conclusion
Conclusion:
This Card sure is bang for the buck. With all the 7800GTX goodies, the card remains second fastest card in the world. Enhanced HDR capability makes this one of a kind. The price is best and most of all, according to EVGA’s recent announcement, with every purchase of EVGA 7800GTX or GT you get a $200 EVGA SLI Motherboard for free. If I wanted any card and I had around $429 budget, 7800GT would be the card I would be buying.
Overclocking feature of this card is still considerable but I would love to see those pipes unclocked.
With SLI Feature, you can increase the performance of 7800GT Card by 40% – 60% so all is not lost. As far as price is concerned, I believe buying a $429 7800GT is way better then buying a $445 6800 Ultra or $469 X850 XT PE.
The con of this series however is the CPU. You atleast need 3.2+ (EM64T ect) or AMD 3500+ to actually see the true performance. In short, more or less both 7800GTX and 7800GT are CPU dependent at resolutions like 1024×768. This doesn’t mean that you’ll get some serious performance with either X850 XT PE or 6800 Ultra, when we say the thing is CPU Dependent, we mean at some point the graphics can’t do anything more and that happens when your using low end processor with highend graphics card. A major problem might arise with those who own 15” – 17” LCDs. They don’t go over 1024×768 or 1280×1024 and at that point, I believe they have no choice but to sit on a tasty fruit cake. They can however turn up the AA and AF settings to 4x/6x or 8x/16x respectively to atleast notice some serious eye candy at these resolutions.
In short everything one looks in a video card is present in this e-GeForce 7800GT.
Pros:
- Great Bundle
- Factory Overclocked
- Overclocking
- Enhanced HDR Support
- SLI Feature
- Price
- Lifetime Warranty
- Custom Face Plate
- Limited Time only: SLI Motherboard for Free
Cons:
- CPU Dependent (buy a good one)
Awards:
Considering the Performance / Price ratio of this product, we believe this card receives our Award of Recommendation.