MSI NX7800GTX Review

A high-end graphics card needs a symbiosis with a high-end CPU. 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 or a rather sizable AMD Athlon 64 3400+; this is something you need at the least. Even with our Athlon 4000+ testing rig we ran into CPU limitation here and there. That’s does not mean games run like crap though, oh of course not. They are way up there in the highest ranking scores and performance. Yet the graphics card can go faster then it’s allowed. The CPU simply isn’t presenting data fast enough to the graphics card driver. Even a game like Half-Life 2 for example can run into that limitation if you turn off stuff like AA and AF and then measure in 1024×768. Of course you’ll have incredible framerates and let me emphasize this again, at blazing speeds. But the graphics card could compute faster if it were allowed to receive more data from the CPU in certain games.

Check out the full review over at Guru 3D!