by Rob Williams on August 22, 2005 in Graphics & Displays
If you are looking for a killer gaming card, but find the 7800GTX too expensive, then you will want to check out the recently released 7800GT. It’s been scaled down to 20 Pipes and 7 Vertex Units but it still packs a massive punch. We are taking a look at the eVGA version, which comes pre-overclocked! Time to see what this beast can do.
The CD-Rom included with the package contained the 77.76 drivers, but since the 77.77 were available I chose to use them instead. Once everything was good to go, I loaded up RivaTuner to see what clocks I was dealing with.
We can see that in 2D mode, the Core Clock is kept at a safe 275MHz. This makes sense since nobody needs 445MHz during normal computer use. We can also see the Memory Clock in it’s overclocked goodness at the promised 1.07GHz.
Now looking at the Performance 3D tab, we see the generous overclock on the Core, a full 45MHz. Now that we verified all the clocks, my next step was to check on the idle temperatures. In our BFG 6800GT review, I mentioned that the idle temps on that card were normally between 61C and 67C. This prevented overclocking of the card at all, since load temps could reach an unreal 100C!
That’s what I’m talking about! With idle temps like these, I could expect the load to hit around 70C, which is certainly efficient enough to allow us to overclock a bit as long as the card agrees.
Let’s now get into some of the main highlights of the 7800 series and then we can finally hit benchmarking!