Introduction

 

ATI seemed to have what looked like a chance to take the 3D graphics performance crown a few weeks ago when they released the Radeon X1800XT which has only recently become available for sale.

 

Last week we saw the release of the 512MB GeForce 7800GTX from nVidia which well and truly made nVidia secure the crown for the current generation of GPU's with some additional memory and higher clock speeds. Also, their new and improved 81.94 ForceWare drivers went a long way to helping their cause. nVidia launched and had product available on store shelves of the 512MB version of the GTX on the day ATI announced it would have their X1800XT product available and so far it seems as if nVidia has the goods... in any way you choose to look at it.

 

We will have a look at the graphics card and the package that XFX supply as we would in a normal review but our main aim here today is overclocking the GeForce 7800GTX 512MB to see exactly what we can get out of one of these bad boys. We'll stick it on our healthily overclocked AMD Athlon X2 test bed system with the impressive ASUS A8N32-SLI motherboard which has full 16x PEG slots.

 

We're expecting some big benchmark numbers, even from a single card setup. Let's quickly move on to the package to see just exactly what we get and what the card looks like before we get into the overclocking action.