XFX 7800GS

Craig Simms gets all dusty for AGP's last hurrah.

For the teeming leagues of people still on AGP and in need of a graphical boost, NVIDIA has slapped a PCI-to-AGP bridge (or HIS - High Speed Interconnect) onto its GeForce 7 series product and delivered the 7800GS, in what will likely be the last gasp of the obsolete slot.

Packed in its standard green X-shaped box, the XFX 7800GS is a single slot, 256MB GDDR3 solution which is powered through a molex connector, rather than the newer PCI-E power cables. Extras are kept slim, including a power splitter and S-Video cable, a DVI to D-Sub adaptor and Tenomichi’s 3D Edit software, a video suite that uses DirectX 9 to accelerate image processing and enhance its interface.

Of course being XFX there is also an ‘extreme’ edition available which can be purchased pre-overclocked (at 440MHz core, 1.3GHz memory), however in this instance we were supplied the vanilla version, at 375MHz/1.2GHz.

With only sixteen pixel and six vertex processors, the GS was never meant to rival the top PCI-E powerhouses of today, but rather slots neatly between the 6800 (350/1000, 16pp/6vp) and 7800GT (400/1000, 20pp/7vp). In a final twist, NVIDIA has halved the ROP count, dropping from sixteen to eight – a curious move considering even its previous generation card featured sixteen ROPs.

In order to test the card, we dug an old Socket A board out from under the dusty motherboard piles in labs where no one dares pry, whacked in our equally dusty Athlon XP 3200+ and 1GB of RAM to simulate the typical system this card is aimed at, and set the benchmarks pumping. Obviously, much like the 9800 PRO, some tests required a lower version of Shader Model to be used. Or in 3DMark06’s case, to crash instead.

As the graphs show, the price definitely represents the kind of performance you can expect from this card compared with the previous generations. Older gamers who can’t let go are finally able to get one last cry out of their system. Don’t expect to play with all the options on though if you want a silky smooth frame rate.

At over half-a-grand, the 7800GS is a solid investment – however once you start spending that much on an old system, it may be worth thinking about an entire upgrade instead.