Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel Pentium 4 EE 3.46GHz (1066MHz FSB)

Motherboard(s): Gigabyte GA-8N SLI Royal (Supplied by Gigabyte)

Memory: 2 X 512MB Corsair PC5400UL DDR2 (Supplied by Corsair)

Hard Disk(s): Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA (Supplied by Western Digital)

Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP1

Drivers: nVidia Forceware 77.72, nForce4 SLI Intel Edition 7.13 and DX9c

We have done a little bit of remodeling since our last review with the benchmarks for the latest and greatest nVidia GPU. For starters, we have finally decided good night to old faithful 3DMark 2001SE - it has served us well and we would like to give a moment of silence...okay, that's enough :).

Battlefield 2 has come to the party with our own custom time demo of yours truly kicking some robot butts and finally with the amount of power on offer from a card like the G70 we have upped our Doom 3 testing from High Quality to Ultra Quality and said good bye to 1024 x 768 high quality tests and hello to 1600 x 1200 high quality tests. With a GPU this powerful, we had to ramp up settings and see what it could do.

Our original plan was to run the 6800GTs in single and SLI mode to compare the performance of them against the 7800 GTX in both single and SLI mode. Unfortunately not everything went to plan and we had trouble with our pair of 6800GTs running in a pair. With that a side we will be comparing the 7800 GTX running in SLI and single mode against our 6800GT in single mode.

3DMark03

Version and / or Patch Used: Build 340

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark03/

Buy It Here

3DMark03 is the latest version of the highly favored 3DMark series. By combining full DirectX®9.0 support with completely new tests and graphics, 3DMark03 continues the legacy of being industry standard benchmark.

Please Note: Due to recent events with the 3DMark03 series, we are adding results purely for those who are still in favor of 3DMark03. These results should not be taken too seriously and are only added for interest sakes.

The 7800GTX in SLI is an absolutely powerful combination with a default score of over 25,000.

This score is just simply amazing considering the machine is running 100% at default and isn't even breaking a sweat yet. We can even see the score jump from the 6800GT with a performance increase of roughly 60% in both resolutions and the SLI combination not only be able to double the 6800GT but almost triple it.

3DMark05

Version and / or Patch Used: Build 110

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark05/

Buy It Here

3DMark05 is the latest version in the popular 3DMark "Gamers Benchmark" series. It includes a complete set of DX9 benchmarks which tests Shader Model 2.0 and higher.

For more information on the 3DMark05 benchmark, we recommend you read our preview here.

Something we didn't expect was to hit a CPU limitation in 3DMark05. You can see that the 7800 GTX is almost double the performance of the 6800GT and at the higher resolution the SLI combination offering an excellent increase from the single card setup.