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EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS CO SuperClock Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Monday, 22 May 2006 |
Madshrimps shares with us a review on the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS CO SuperClock graphics card. Is AGP dead? Not yet according to NVIDIA and EVGA and we applaud their stubbornness. The e-GeForce 7800 GS from EVGA we are testing today has an upgraded cooling solution and comes at SuperClocked speeds, way beyond those specified by the reference design. To be able to use a graphics card based on PCI Express you have to buy a new motherboard, maybe a new CPU and possibly a new power supply. That makes it quite an expensive upgrade. Luckily there are still some manufactures who haven't abandoned the AGP architecture completely. NVIDIA is one of them and with their GeForce 7800 GS they have introduced their GeForce 7 series to the AGP masses.
 EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS CO SuperClock Review
The core of the GeForce 7 series, the G70, was designed as a native PCI Express chip, but thanks to an additional bit of electronics the PCI Express signal is translated to AGP and vice versa. Unfortunately this method of making the card backwards compatibility is a costly affair and in the future with the diminishing size of the AGP market we might not see a repeat. Making the GeForce 7800 GS GPU the last of a dying breed. EVGA is pushing hard into the European market, competing with XFX and Gainward for their share of the video cards sales. They are winning over the hearts of many hardware enthusiasts.
Since the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS CO SuperClock is already overclocked to 460MHz I wasn't really expecting to get much more out of it. After installing CoolBits the overclock panel was present in the advanced properties of the video card in Windows. It seems there is still some headroom left, even in a cramped case with poor ventilation the card overclocked to 490MHz on the GPU and 1410MHz on the memory (up from 1350MHz). With better cooling even higher clock speeds might be possible. Under full load the GPU temperature never exceeded 54°C.
Looking at the benchmarks results it's clear that you shouldn't despair yet when you still have an AGP based system, the performance from the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GS CO SuperClock is the best you can get. It can be recommended in the following situations, to upgrade the graphics power of your aging AGP system without having the buy a new motherboard, CPU and/or memory and be able to play the latest games. Or to allow you to get playable frame rates at higher resolutions than the GeForce 6800 GT, if you happen to have one of those.
In short, the EVGA SuperClocked version has seduced us with its performance and silent cooling, with a minimum price of €410 it's not really a budget friendly solution, but if you want to best for your AGP system, there are simply not other choices.
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