BFG GeForce 7800 GT OC

Nathan Davis gets down and dirty with NVIDIA's latest lovechild.

Lighter than the 7800GTX, being equipped with an all-aluminium cooler with no back plate, the 7800GT metaphorically screams in at twenty pixel shader pipelines with seven vertex shaders. In comparison to the 7800GTX, the 7800GT has only had four pixel pipelines and one vertex shader switched off. Where the real changes have occurred is at the frequency level, with a 400MHz core (as compared to the 7800GTX’s 430MHz) and 1000MHz GDDR3 memory (as compared to 1200MHz).

It doesn’t sport any particularly planet-breaking technology, but rather it plays existing technology faster and more efficiently. Technologies such as 16x anisotropic filtering (albeit not full screen), High Dynamic Range lighting (HDR), radiosity, depth of field and other real time effects, such as water, have all been given a powerful boost. It also now supports 16x antialiasing, however this was cleverly restricted to SLI mode.

As the focus of NVIDIA draws more on raw speed, so has BFG’s stance. As such, we’re now seeing 7800 series cards being sold at faster than the rated clock speeds – both the core clock frequency and the memory. BFG has bumped this 7800GT to a 425MHz core (merely 5MHz less than the 7800GTX) and ticking in at 1050MHz for the GDDR3 memory.

It’s great to see companies such as BFG carrying legacies of pre-overclocking cards. Purchasing a preoverclocked card by the manufacturer means it’s covered entirely under warranty. Great news, really, when you consider overclocking is much less an art form than it used to be, yet it still voids those often-handy warranties.

Even though the 7800 series is more of a speed boost to existing technologies, one of the interesting key aspects to come out of this seventh generation NVIDIA card is a technique known as transparency adaptive sampling.

This new filter waves goodbye to the jaggy seemingly-just-floating-there power lines and physics-defying blades of grass.

Whipping out the test results, we were pleased to find another kick arse card that performs on-par in real-world testing with its GTX counterpart. Synthetic testing in 3Dmark05 of course increased the gap by a sizeable margin, so the GTX is obviously more equipped to handle future games with heavier use of shadows and pixel shading techniques.

With the substantial drops in raw frequency, as we’ve found over the recent years, features are primarily what matter most. Seeing as the pipelines are essentially still intact, this chip has screaming performance. Coupled with a manufacturer’s overclock, you’re laughing all the way to your SLI rig, especially if you consider the difference in price. It’s pretty clear the 7800GT, like the 6800GT before it, will become a standard for its price/performance ratio.

The noise on this card is, surprisingly, a little louder than the 7800GTX cards we’ve looked at in the past, but not in a particularly cranial-blasting manner. It’s only slight, so running two of these beasts would only be a luxury to the senses.

BFG has made this card VIVO compatible, so it not only packs a punch with the exhibited insanely good gaming performance, but it is also equipped with more inputs and outputs than one could toss a monkey at. Which is a damn good thing. Sporting the usual two DVI outs with d-sub adapters, composite and s-video, it also has component out for HDTVs, and as a result, far superior image quality. For video in, it comes with composite and s-video in lines, being the standard form of input these days.

What this card is – and the 7800 range for that matter – is fast, but it’s more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Regardless, the 7800GT is quite simply an über multimedia powerhouse, capable of spitting out grunty graphics at a rate very close to that of its superior, only less expensively so. The 7800GT is the overclocker’s new pantscreamer, and BFG has pulled out a winner with this tasty piece of PCB.