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EVGA eGeForce 7900 GT CO Superclocked

Michael Brown — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 13:51:38 -0500

Can’t afford a top-shelf videocard like the screamin’ XFX model reviewed here? Take comfort in the knowledge that EVGA has an impressively overclocked version of the only slightly less powerful GeForce 7900 GT: Its $360 street price is $230 lower than the aforementioned 7900 GTX card.

eVGA’s main contribution was to factory-overclock the GPU and memory, from 450- and 660MHz, respectively, to 550MHz for the core and 790MHz for the 256MB of GDDR3 memory. But nVidia also deserves a share of the credit for this card’s performance. Unlike the 7800 GT, which achieved its cost savings by lopping off four pipes and one vertex shader, the 7900 GT has a full complement of 24 pixel pipelines and eight vertex shaders—just like its more costly cousins, the 7800 and 7900 GTXs.

As a result, you don’t need to sacrifice eye candy in the name of frame rate. Just take a look at the benchmark charts: Running Quake 4 in High Quality mode, with 4x antialiasing, 8x anisotropic filtering, and resolution ratcheted up to 1600x1200, a single card mustered an impressive 59.6 frames per second. The card was even more impressive in our FEAR benchmark: At the same resolution, but with soft shadows turned on and AA turned off (a bug in the game dictates enabling one or the other, but not both), eVGA’s card came within one frame per second of matching the much more expensive Sapphire Radeon X1900 XTX (reviewed here).

Things get even more exciting when you bring SLI into the picture. The two cards scaled well running in our new Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard, which allows both PCI Express slots to operate in x16 mode: We saw a 60 percent boost in performance running our Call of Duty 2 benchmark. This is one midrange card we expect to see on our on Best of the Best list for a while.

Month Reviewed: June 2006

Verdict: 9
kickass=yes

URL: www.evga.com

ATI Radeon X1900 XTX

Michael Brown — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:07:49 -0600

After failing to deliver on some mighty big promises with its R520 architecture (the X1800 series), a humbled ATI went quietly back to the drawing board. And this time, it came up with a winner: The X1900 XTX—powered by the company’s new R580 GPU—is a beauty and a beast.

In the process, ATI successfully challenged some of our assumptions about what makes a powerful videocard. Based on the spectacular performance of nVidia’s 20-pipe GeForce 7800 GT and 24-pipe 7800 GTX, our eyebrows went up when we heard that the X1900 XTX would have only 16 pipes. But ATI proved us wrong. By pairing those 16 pipes with 48 pixel-shader units, the company managed to build a part that’s slightly faster on most benchmarks than nVidia’s 512MB 7800 GTX.

But we’re less impressed by the X1900 XTX’s speed than we are by its image quality. ATI had boasted that its Avivo technology would improve every aspect of the visual experience, but early drivers failed to expose its best features. We had all but dismissed Avivo as marketing hype, because nothing we saw in ATI’s dog-and-pony shows materialized in the products we reviewed.

Our opinion evolved, however, with the driver release accompanying the All in Wonder X1800 XL (reviewed February 2006), and it morphed further with the X1800 XT CrossFire Edition (reviewed March 2006). The X1900 XTX’s HQV benchmark score hasn’t changed since then—although it still spanks nVidia’s PureVideo decoder scores—but the difference in color saturation (which the HQV benchmark doesn’t measure) is absolutely striking: Avivo is for real. Besides, Avivo improves the quality of all video, while PureVideo works with only MPEG-2 videos.

The X1900 XTX is slightly less exciting when measured in terms of its performance with games. As you can see from the benchmark chart, it squeaks past nVidia’s reference-design 512MB 7800 GTX on some fronts, but trails it on others. And as we’ve seen with other X1000-series cards, a single X1900 XTX paradoxically runs just a little faster in an nForce4-chipset environment than it does with ATI’s own Radeon Xpress 200 chipset (we tested the card with an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard and a Sapphire Technology PC-A9RD480Adv, respectively). But if you want to build a CrossFire system, you’ll have to buy an ATI chipset. (We’ve heard reports that some OEMs are building CrossFire systems using nForce4 motherboards, but these drivers aren’t available to individuals.)

It’s important to note, however, that the areas in which the X1900 XTX outperforms the 7800 GTX dovetail with the direction in which game developers are headed: ATI’s highest-end card trails nVidia’s in 3DMark03 performance by nine percent, but it bests nVidia’s 3DMark05 score by nearly 13 percent. We’re still evaluating the recently released 3DMark06 for inclusion in our benchmark suite, but it was enlightening to see that the X1900 XTX outperformed the 7800 GTX on this test almost entirely due to its Shader Model 3.0 and high dynamic-range lighting performance.

When you pit CrossFire against SLI, however, ATI’s 3DMark05 advantage shrinks to less than two percent, and it edges out nVidia’s cards by just three percent at 3DMark06. We’re not big fans of CrossFire’s external connection cables, either.

So, ATI has bested nVidia for the first time in a long time: The X1900 XTX is slightly faster than a 512MB 7800 GTX, and it’s widely available as we go to press. As nVidia bends down to pick up the gauntlet, however, it should be thinking of more than just horsepower: It needs an answer to Avivo, as well.

Month Reviewed: April 2006

+ CINEMASCOPE: Slightly faster than nVidia's best, but Avivo is the real selling point.

- KINESCOPE: CrossFire remains a hoopty dual-card solution that must be disabled for movies.

VERDICT: 9
kickass=yes

URL: www.ati.com

Asus N7800GT Dual

Michael Brown — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 16:22:46 -0600

What could be better than running two GeForce 7800 GT cards in SLI? How about two GeForce 7800 GTs and 512MB of memory in a single card? Asus has built just such a beast, albeit in very limited supply, with a couple restrictions, and at a relatively high price.

Gigabyte went down this road last year, with the GV-3D1-68GT (featuring dual 6800 GTs). Asus takes the concept a couple steps further: Not only does the N7800GT Dual feature a faster GPU, but Asus tells us its working on a new motherboard design that will enable you to run two of these cards in SLI to create a quad-GPU system.

Asus recommends running the card with only Asus’ own driver, which is based on nVidia’s ForceWare version 77.77. But we also tested the card with nVidia’s ForceWare 81.95, and the card obediently delivered slightly better benchmark numbers (leaving us to wonder why Asus made such a recommendation in the first place. For the record, the benchmarks published here are based on Asus’ drivers.)

The N7800GT Dual has other limitations, too: It’s compatible with only certain nForce4 motherboards, including Asus’ own P5ND2-SLI and A8N-SLI series, and Gigabyte’s K8NXP-SLI. The card ran fine in our A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard with PC Power and Cooling’s Turbo-Cool 510 SLI power supply, but you also have the option of plugging the card into an external power supply all its own.

In terms of performance, the N7800GT Dual proved to be slightly faster than two conventional 7800 GT cards running in SLI. But this card’s $800 price tag renders it about $100 more expensive than a pair of 7800 GT cards from Asus’ competitors. Buyers should also take the driver restriction into account.

Month Reviewed: March 2006

Verdict: 8

URL: www.asus.com