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XFX GeForce 7800 GS Extreme 256MB AGP Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Friday, 03 February 2006 |
PC Perspective brings us a review on the XFX GeForce 7800 GS Extreme 256MB AGP graphics card. It has been more than a year since our last AGP graphics card review; the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT. It has been even longer since we have seen a high end GPU released in an AGP format, and because of that I basically assumed, as did most users, that AGP was dead and gone. NVIDIA had second thoughts on this though, and decided to take one more stab at an AGP part. And it makes sense; there is a large group of users out there that still have AGP motherboards and platforms that may not plan on upgrading to the new PCI Express based systems any time soon.
 XFX GeForce 7800 GS Extreme 256MB AGP Review
The GeForce 7800 GS GPU should be very familiar to anyone that has read our other G70 based product reviews. Since the initial launch of the GeForce 7800 GTX NVIDIA has been making slight changes and modifications to the core to place it in different market segments. The GeForce 7800 GT took 4 pixel pipes and a single vertex pipe off of the GTX model, lowered the clocks and lowered the price. The GeForce 7800 GS follows a similar patter; take 8 pixel pipes and 2 vertex pipes off of the GTX model, lower the clocks and lower the price.
With lower clocks and fewer pipelines for processing, this obviously means slightly lower performance, but it should still be a big upgrade over anything else available on the AGP side from NVIDIA. The GeForce 7800 GS is still based on the 110 nm process with about 302 million transistors according to NVIDIA. The memory bus is still 256-bits wide and the cards default memory configuration comes with 256MB for a total memory bandwidth of 38.4 GB/s. The reference clock speeds on the GeForce 7800 GS are set at 375/1200MHz.
Even though I might be eating my words again later, let's just go ahead and assume this is the last AGP flagship update that we will ever see from NVIDIA or ATI. How does that leave the platform for any gamers still using it? To be completely honest with you, I assumed coming into this article that the NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS would just run all over the one year old ATI Radeon X850 XT PE card. That didn't really happen at all. In some tests the ATI card outperformed even the overclocked XFX GeForce 7800 GS Extreme card and left the NVIDIA reference clocked card well behind.
An upgrade for AGP users was desperately needed for gamers looking for top performance and all the latest features without having to move to another platform. The GeForce 6800 GT's and Ultra's had pretty much dried up in the market so we had a suspicion something like this was coming. While not the knock-out performance leader, the GeForce 7800 GS has more to offer than any other ATI AGP offering and should serve the AGP market well for the future and to the end of its life cycle.
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