Introduction

Games like Doom 3, The Chronicles of Riddick, and the ever-popular (albeit still buggy) Battlefield 2 are capable of testing the limits of even the best video cards. This is good news for people who are able to fork over the money for the hardware to make these games look good, but might be bad news for everyone else. NVIDIA's 7800 series has proven itself to be just about the best graphics card on the market and the different variations (by different manufacturers) are squeezing every last drop of performance out of NVIDIA's card.

We are going to be deviating somewhat from past articles where big video card "roundups" were the norm. Instead, this will be the first in a series of articles about cards based on NVIDIA's 7800 GTX. This will help us deal with the headaches that come with getting cards from the manufacturers and testing them all at once. The first in the series is the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX, which looks to be an impressive contender.

For this series of articles, we will be covering what each product offers out of the box. Along with this, we will be overclocking our cards and testing performance at stock and at overclocked speeds. Over time, we will be able get a good idea of how each card compares to the rest of the pack. In a way, we can think of these articles as a very large round-up stretched out over time.

In addition to overclocking, we will be looking at heat, power draw, and noise for each card. Some of these may end up looking fairly similar because many vendors tend to stick with a reference design, but expect to see a few different heat sink variations along the way that may change things up a little bit.

The final verdict will really come down to the extras that each card offers as well as the price of each card. For each article in the series, we will update our prices to reflect the current market, and we will make our recommendations based on that.

Without further ado, we bring you the first of our 7800 series reviews with the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX in all its glory.

The Card
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  • masteraleph - Sunday, July 17, 2005 - link

    Where's the comment about Dual-Link DVI on one of the outputs? Shouldn't the fact that this card can run the Apple 30" display be noted somewhere in the review?
  • semo - Saturday, July 16, 2005 - link

    the upcoming 7800 from evga will have (with the green cooler) asymmetric cooling system (acs). xbitlabs has reported on it yesterday i think
  • tommyw - Saturday, July 16, 2005 - link

    I was reading this article http://www.digit-life.com/news.html?119317
    and would be interested to know if Anandtech has any comments on it. According to that, if I understood properly, it is not possible to change the clocks by 1MHz steps, but by 27MHz steps. And that different parts of the core work on different frequencies.

    Interesting how will this change OCing? New challenges, yes :-) !!
  • L3p3rM355i4h - Saturday, July 16, 2005 - link

    Last page type "pricy"
  • Son of a N00b - Saturday, July 16, 2005 - link

    yeah OC'ing is an addiction...I still OC my 6800's a bit to play CSS even though I do not have to everytime I play (i never leave it set to startup for stability issues)....but I cannot play if my cards are not OC'ed

    anyways AWESOME article and idea for it guys! cant wait to see BFG's
  • JustAnAverageGuy - Saturday, July 16, 2005 - link

    Typo, page 3

    7800 GXT

    Typo, page 4

    "PowerStreams"
  • PrinceGaz - Saturday, July 16, 2005 - link

    If I was going to spend about $600 on a gfx card, I think I would enable at least 4x AA in games that work correctly with it. If ncessary drop down to 1600x1200 from the tested 1920x1440 or 2048x1536; my monitor does support 2048x1536 and at a good refresh rate (85hz), but the jaggies are far more noticeable at 2048x1536 without AA, than they are at 1600x1200 with 4x AA.
  • Samus - Saturday, July 16, 2005 - link

    I can't believe they put up all those charts and failed to compare it to ANYTHING other than a 7000 series card. As #2 stated, exactly how many people are going to overclock this card? How many people care?

    I can tell you a lot of people care to know how well it fares against a 6800.
  • Zebo - Saturday, July 16, 2005 - link

    XFX 7800GTX is much better

    470/1250 default OC and a pretty decent game controller included. Some dudes are hitting 490/1300 pretty easy with mild OCing.

    #2 -- I agree for most part.. It's different taking a 1.8 A64 to 2.8, scores will massivly improve..but some of us like to OC everything no matter what..it's an addiction trust me.:P
  • drifter106 - Saturday, July 16, 2005 - link

    #5 thanks for the comment on your card and its overclocking ability...some people just don't know how to comprehend the written word...maybe they need to get their shit together before they make themselves look silly

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