Page 1

XFX GeForce 7800 GS Extreme Edition

A week or two ago NVIDIA introduced a new impressive AGP card to the market. In the lower segment of the high-end range they released the GeForce 7800 GS. Armed with a sharp pricetag and the power of a GeForce 6800 Ultra this product was well received onto the consumer market. The product we are looking at today might very well be our last AGP review. It's the second GeForce 7800 GS we take a peek at, yet this one comes from XFX, it's produced under the Extreme Edition label .. and you know what that means.. at default a faster clocked graphics card. And hey ... we just love extra performance don't we ?

A GeForce 7800 GS in the flavor AGP. A lot of you went wild as there finally is a really nice upgrade for all the AGP PC's out there, and there's still quite a few of them. It's a card that doesn't require a hound dog of a processor to work aside with, and it's even priced really good at roughly 299 USD.

And you just know that this price will drop in the upcoming weeks. On the other side, it does only have 16 pixel pipelines and a rather slowed down core frequency but hey ... it's fast for sure my friends.

Also I just have to mention that with a Series 7 product you are up-to date again as you do get the performance, video en/decoding capabilities and very fine Shader model 3 support.

Focus on the chart below where I cite the more important specs.

Product Name

# pixel processors

# vertex processors

Bus width

Memory Type/Amount

GPU Speed

RAM Speed

GeForce 6800 Ultra **

16

6

256-bit

GDDR3/256MB

400MHz

1100MHz

GeForce 6800 GT

16

6

256-bit

GDDR3/256MB

350MHz

1000MHz

GeForce 6800

12

5

256-bit

GDDR/128MB

325MHz

700MHz

GeForce 6800 LE

8

4

256-bit

GDDR/128MB

320MHz

700MHz

** Not manufactured anymore

They armed this AGP 7800 GS with high-end GDDR3 memory, which runs at a lovely 650 MHz clock (that's effectively 1300 MHz and thus 100 MHz higher than NVIDIA reference). Interestingly enough this product might swing between GeForce 6800 GT and Ultra performance here and there due to the similar frame buffer bandwidth and equal pipelines. Series 7 graphics cores however are a far more efficient product.

Now then, I already explained to you that XFX is overclocking this card at default as this is the Extreme Edition. And that faster clock not a lame 10 MHz either ! You receive this .. a 440 MHz clocked on the core and 1.300 MHz on the memory is what you are getting straight out of the box. This card will surely perform better then the standard NVIDIA reference model 7800 GS.

Let's touch first base with what we are talking about today and that would be the powerful GeForce 7800 GS.

There it is, the XFX GeForce 7800 GS Extreme Edition