XFX 7800GTX 512mb

[kempez]

Right well I now have the 7800GTX in and running at the moment

I can tell you this: its sweet!

I'm about to play some games but thought I'd give you a few quick benchie shots and some write-up.

Initial Thoughts:

Well the Packaging on XFX's GTX 512mb looks HUGE.

It makes the card looks awesomly big. I think every time I buy a new card the packaging gets bigger!



Good overall package including X², Moto GP and Farcry. A complete package of software indeed!

I did think that it was lacking in the extra hardware department though. No adaptors or anything that is needed if you don't have a PCI-E connector (molex to PCI-E power adaptor). A small point maybe, but not as polished as I would have expected with a £500+ card!

Aside from that XFX packaged the card up the best I've ever seen a graphics card packaged with plenty of foam



The card itself:

I'm sure by now you've seen plenty of images of this thing, but I took a couple of dodgy pics of my own.





Once again I can only highlight the massive cooler on this thing. Massive but I have to say: quiet

You can also see the copper base that this thing has one it: adding to the already fairly weighty card.

Never mind though as the dual slot cooler screws into both PCI backplate connectors and feels nice and firm.

I always like the coolers that expel hot air out of the back. This follows traditions of Arctic Silencers and of course the Quadro

Installation

As usual this was very easy. Uninstall drivers, turn off, take old card out.

Stick new card in screw up, switch on and your away...

Well not quite. I had to download new nvidia drivers for the card. 88.91's (I think) so thats was ok.

Its very close to the next PCI-E slot:



Clocks:

Stock Clocks:



And I did a quick auto-adjust on the nvidia panel and it came out with:



Not too bad for no puching at all.

I'll be overclocking tomorrow: not today. All in all the familiar nvidia drivers and the usual smooth installation.

Benchies:

Well as expected this card breezes through the usual benchies. Getting some impressive scores.

'03

21454



'05

10197



AQ3

108, 619



I could not upload the aquamark as the ARC is down

Also I could not get a referring URL for the tests as Futuremark lists the GPU as "Generic VGA" and will not give me a link for it.

I do have them in my project manager though.

Initial impressions:

This card has started off very impressivly. I'm looking forward to gaming on it and also puching it a bit () further.

Update: Games

For all the game tests I have tweaked the nvidia drivers to eek every bit of quality out of this sexy card:

I raised the graphics driver settings to "High Quality" to get rid of any texture shimmering. I enabled in the drivers: Transparency AA: Supersampling and Gamma Correct AA.

CSS

This card handles CSS with ease. Not much point me waxing lyrical with it. If I disable vsync then this card plays at about 100+FPS in CSS all day long. Thats with 4 x 16 x 1680 x 1050 with everything maxed out.



Delivers a smooth sexy gaming experience

F.E.A.R

F.E.A.R. is a gorgeous looking and quite demanding game using DirectX 9.0c for much of its high end features.

I tweaked F.E.A.R.s settings so that I would get a smooth gaming experience in 1680 x 1050. This F.E.A.R. tweak guide was used to achieve this.



This involved everything on Maximum apart from:

° FSAA (Full Screen AA) Set to 2 x AA
° Soft Shadows set to off

This provided for me a smooth gaming experience, not going below 35FPS and keeping an average 55FPS throughout my very action-intense run-through.

The game simply looks awesome. Really superb and this card really churns through it. An extremely pleasent gaming experience I must say!

I'm sure the 2gb RAM helped me on this front too :yumyum:

BF-2

BF-2 needs 2gb so if your going to get a GTX 512mb then make sure you have the necessary RAM to get it all going.

For BF-2 I again used the Tweak Guides article to get it running in my native res.

BF-2 played nicely with 4 x AA and Full AF on in the games. I set everything else to MAX and away I went.



BF-2 looks great with this card and a very smooth experience was once again achieved with the 7800GTX 512mb.

Farcry

I've been having a bit of problems playing Farcry due to a driver glitch and was again experiencing problems. When I eventually managed to get it to run ok it played nicely with HDR enabled to 5, no AA obviously.

Smooth gaming once again!

DoD:S

DoD:S Played and looked amazing with the 7800GTX. Everything was put on in the in-game settings (apart from 4 x AA) and it ran very nicely at 16 AF @ 1680 x 1050.



Download Do:S - you'll love the gorgeous HDR

*I may do a quick Doom 3 runthrough to see if I can put this baby on Ultra setting later on

Conclusion

The 7800GTX 512mb is awe-inspiringly powerful. It breezes through the years more challenging titles and even tames F.E.A.R. with a smal compromise. The graphics are sexy and the FPS is smooth throughout all of the gaming I've done.

Ojn another note: the dual-slot cooler has lowered case temps by a degree or two (exhausting out the back) so this is another plus IMO.

I'm glad I got this card. Go and buy my 7800GTX 256mb so I don't have the debt collectors round!


Updates soon folks!

[Goberpiles]

Great review has made my mind up for sure, scan get ready for my call

[xpronic]

Indeed it is a great review, but I don't have £500 to spend on a graphics card, so I'll just stick with the 25MB version lol.