For those of you who have followed our previous articles, NVIDIA has internally announced the GeForce 7800GS; a 16 pipe replacement for the GeForce 6800GT and 6800 Ultra. We recently got a chance to benchmark the card, and not surprisingly the performance is right between the GeForce 6800GS and GeForce 7800GT. However, what was perhaps most interesting about the card was that NVIDIA's current driver support; current drivers had no problem detecting the 7800GS in our test beds. The 7800GS uses the same 110nm G70 core as the GeForce 7800GT and 7800GTX.

The card we benchmarked came with a 375MHz core clock and a 1000MHz memory clock. Even with an entire quad disabled, our internal testing proved that the card was ample competition for ATI's X1800XL. Currently, we are working on enabling the disabled quad and/or overclocking the 7800GS up to 7800GT and GTX speeds. With a good price point, the GeForce 7800GS could easily become 2006's rendition of the Radeon X800GTO^2. A 16 pipe version of 7800GT would easily best a GeForce 6800GT or 6800 Ultra (at least on paper), but with current drivers we've already witnessed higher performance than that.

You may notice our first screenshot showed a total of 2 PCIe lanes. We are still working on this, and it looks like the screenshot only demonstrates an anomaly of the motherboard. Stay tuned for the full review within the next few days!