GeForce 7800 GT Triple (SLI) Round Up - Page 1

The GeForce 7800 GT performance abilities with a threesome...

Products: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT (also SLI)
eVGA information - website evga.com
Point of View Information - pointofview-online.com
NVIDIA - nvidia.com

No less then two months after NVIDIA launched their beautiful GeForce 7800 GTX and quite honestly way sooner then I really expected, it's time to release a new product already. You of course heard and read about the product a couple of times already as it has been widely speculated by pretty much, well everybody I guess. First things first, rumors where pretty darn accurate this time. Today's product is of course based on the 7800 GTX, yet when you make such graphics chips you have to face yields. Let's talk a little about yields.

Let me tell you a small story about making chips, and I do not mean the eatable potato kind. Usually chip manufacturers like NVIDIA make an entire range of products based on the same chip. What happens? Yields. The success rate of the fabrication process, not everything on all chips on that wafer will work 100%, GPU's will have slight deficiencies. So let's say that you design a 32-pipeline chip with a very small fabrication process. On the wafer over 50% of the chips might be not working, 30% has deficiencies yet is working and the remaining chips are the high-end product which are flawless. So the chip is often the same yet can be another product. Most of you experienced this with the 12-pipe GeForce 6800 series. With the help of rivatuner you can experiment a little and if you are lucky, you can enable extra pipes or vertex units.

Why this little story? Well you see, the 7800 GTX has 24 Pixel Pipelines and 8 Vertex Units. Today's GeForce 7800 GT has 20 Pixel Pipelines and 7 Vertex Units. Obviously a lower yield product from the same production line. Now before I start a false mass hysteria and hear people saying "So I'm buying a damaged product". No, no trust me that isn't the case. Sure you have 4 pixel pipelines deactivated, but the remaining 20 of course work 100%. So what's the difference then between the GT and GTX?  Well, feature wise nothing. Expect performance differences of course.

Why release a GT version after the GTX you ask? Again a simple answer is sufficient. The GTX is a raw 3D rendering beast, but it's an expensive beast for sure, likely due to low yields as it is expensive to make that part. The 7800 GT my friends obviously has way better yields and is over 150 bucks cheaper at 449 USD making this one attractive buy. One rumor was wrong for sure though, the 7800 GT is SLI compatible, that means you can upgrade and scale up that 3D rendering gaming rig of yours.

It's time to let another lion 'roar' but first a witty story...   right now it's Monday and I had to start up this article, yet a dark cloud was hovering above the Guru3D trenches as none of the promised videocards had arrived! NVIDIA Europe received their batch of press GT cards barely on the finish line on Monday and thus could only get a sample out to us by Tuesday at the earliest. Point of View should have sent out a board last Friday, yet that one wasn't in also. eVGA promised a board yet that one I did not expect to arrive before the end of this week as it was shipped from the USA (Ed: I would like to take this oppurtunity to say you could have sent it to me!).

And see, the thing is... there was a typhoon in Japan over the weekend that has delayed most shipments. So basically I prepared myself to write a preview without any card available.

The Geforce 7800 GT triplets

NVIDIA however promised to ship out a card that Monday, then Murphy's law kicked in big-time. Right now when I'm writing this introduction it's Tuesday. Minutes ago a big smile came on my face with a 'thank God' expression as the one party, which I did not expect to ship in a sample all the way from the USA on time before the actual launch, came through. That's one card that is in. Five minutes later, that really cute and lovely girl from UPS is here with two packages, one from NVIDIA and another one from Point of View. Yeah do the math, you guessed right.

So instead of having no cards prior to the launch, we now have three 7800 GT cards available for testing. And you know what? I'm going to unleash hell on myself as we are going to test them all today. Hey we'll even throw in some nice SLI results, deal?

Specs	GeForce 6600	GeForce 6600 GT	GeForce 6800	GeForce 6800 GT	GeForce 6800 Ultra	GeForce 7800 GT		GeForce 7800 GTX
Codename	NV43	NV43	NV40	NV40GT	NV40U	G71		G70
Transistors	?	?	222 million			302 million		302 million
Process, GPU maker	110nm	110nm	130nm, IBM			110nm		110nm
Core clock	300 MHz	500 MHz	Up to 400 MHz	350MHz	400MHz	400 MHz		430 MHz
Memory	128MB DDR1	128MB GDDR3	128MB DDR1	256MB GDDR3
Memory bus	128-bit		256-bit
Memory clock	Up to manufacturer	2x500 MHz	2 x 550MHz	2 x 500MHz	2 x 600MHz		2 x 500MHz	2 x 600MHz
PCB	P212	P212	P2??	P210	P210	-
Pipelines	8	8	12	16	16	20		24
FP operations	FP16, FP32
DirectX	DirectX 9.0c
Pixel shaders	Pixel Shaders 3.0
Vertex shaders	Vertex Shaders 3.0
OpenGL	1.5+ (2.0)					2.0
Price	$150	$229	$299	$399	$499	$449		$599
Availability	Now

So then, in this article we will review NVDIA's reference GeForce 7800 GT, eVGA's e-GeForce 7800 GT and Point of View's GeForce 7800 GT. All cards are armed with a luxurious 256 MB of GDDR3 (256-bit) memory and are pretty much 99% based on that reference model. First we'll cover the GeForce 7800 GT in general, then we'll look at the differences in software bundles, do a little photo shoot, fire off some benchmarks at them, combine them in SLI mode, overclock them and then will wrap everything up in a nice conclusion.

Follow me please, to the next page, on you go... hushhhh.