NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT: Rounding Out The High End
by Derek Wilson & Josh Venning on August 11, 2005 12:15 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Power Consumption
With fewer pipelines and lower clock speeds, the 7800 GT should require less power to operate. While that may not matter much for people with high-end desktop systems, there are many areas that would benefit from a cooler running GPU. Small form factor cases and laptops are two such areas, so let's see how the 7800 GT compares to the other cards.
Both Idle and Load power graphs clearly show that the 7800 GT is a superior performer. This card is much less power hungry than the 6800 Ultra and performs better across the board. These characteristics lend themselves very well to applications like mobile computing. With lower power consumption comes longer battery life, less heat, and more performance for portable computing.
The current trend in notebooks is to give as big a slice of the TDP as possible to the graphics card. A low power CPU is used in the system and terrific gaming performance is still available. The 2GHz and up Pentium M CPUs are quite capable of providing good gaming performance. If NVIDIA lowers the power needs on its mobile parts significantly, OEMs can afford to use more power for the CPU or cheaper (and lighter) cooling solutions. This is good news for anyone in the market for any type of mobile computer. Here's to hoping the GeForce Go 7 Series makes its debut sooner rather than later.
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MemberSince97 - Thursday, August 11, 2005 - link
I hear these OC pretty well, how about some comparisons.adonn78 - Thursday, August 11, 2005 - link
First off, no gamer plays videogames at resolutions above 1600x1200! Most of us stick to 1024x768 so that we can get high framerates and enable akk thge features and play the game on the highest settings. In addition you did not show how the GT and GTX stacked up against the previous generation suchs as the 6800 ultra, GT and the 5950 ultra. And Where is the AGP version? My computer is 2 years old and I am upgrading my graphics card soon. I guess I'll wait to see if ATI makes AGP cards for their next generation. And where the heck is the R520? ATI is really lagging this time around. Hopefully we will get some AGP love. AGP still got a good 2 years of life left in it.Locut0s - Thursday, August 11, 2005 - link
Speak for yourself but as an owner of a 21" CRT, and I know I'm not the only one, I can see using resolutions above 1600x1200 quiet easily.JNo - Thursday, August 11, 2005 - link
"no gamer plays videogames at resolutions above 1600x1200!"Er, I have a Dell 2405 monitor running at 1920x1200 and I always run it native where possible (even with my 6600GT, many modern games are *playable* including CS Source, Far Cry) so this statement is complete balls. Obviously I would like a faster card to run games as smooth as possible so the tested resolutions are extremely pertinent to me.
DrZoidberg - Thursday, August 11, 2005 - link
The high resolutions are needed cause at 1024x768 there will hardly be any difference between 6800GT, 7800GT, x850xt, 7800GTX cause all these cards handle this resolution easily and they will give similar fps cause they will all be CPU limited.vijay333 - Thursday, August 11, 2005 - link
I believe the higher resolutions are used because at the lower ones there really isn't much differentiation between the various cards. The article title is "Rounding Out The High End" so hopefully there'll be another comparing the performance against mid-range cards (high-end from previous generation). AGP is missing, but is there really that much difference between the AGP and PCIe versions of the same card?vijay333 - Thursday, August 11, 2005 - link
Cool. very recently bought an eVGA 6800GT. given their step-up program, plan on paying the difference and getting the 7800 GT in 2-3 months when the price is bound to be lower.John - Thursday, August 11, 2005 - link
Josh/Derek, please add 6800 Ultra benchmarks to this review for a comparison.GoatMonkey - Thursday, August 11, 2005 - link
They at least have ATI 850 benchmarks on there. You can approximate where the 6800 series cards are going to be from that. It would be nice to see them on there also though if possible.Lonyo - Thursday, August 11, 2005 - link
They have, just not for BF2.