SUMMARY: Hot on the heels of nVidia's GeForce 7800 GTX graphics card launch last week, we've already received Gigabyte's retail offering which is being shipped into the market around the world. We will be having a look at what Gigabyte are offering the public with the first retail 7800 GTX that we have seen. We will also be looking at if these cards offer us any extra performance over our reference cards that we looked at last week.
When writing part one of our G70 coverage last week in regard to the 7800 GTX and what nVidia’s partners were offering, out of the collection of boxes we saw the Gigabyte offering, which was one of my personal favorites.
Once the boxes came to us they did not disappoint and on a store shelf they would look great. You can see that Gigabyte have moved away from your conventional landscape box and used a portrait design this time around. The front of the box gives us all our regular information of what is on offer from the Gigabyte 7800 GTX.
We can see that we have PCI Express, VIVO, HDTV, 256MB of DDR3 memory and a software bundle that weighs in at roughly $190.
In the package we receive our normal manual along with a PCI E power adapter, DVI to VGA connector and a little black box which takes care of the HDTV/VIVO features of the card in an all in one package which is great.
When it comes to the CD bundle we have included our normal driver CD along with PowerDirector and two games - Xpand Rally and Joint Operations. The bundle isn’t all that exciting for the cost that the card but like we have said so many times before, people would rather save $50 then get a whole lot of useless games they will never play... and to be honest who isn’t playing Battlefield 2 at the moment?
The Cards
Good things come in pairs and that theory is spot on when it comes to SLI. When you compare the Gigabyte 7800 GTX to the reference cards we looked at there are really only two noticeable differences.
The first is the big black chip above the black heatsink and capacitor is a different color. On our reference cards it is a more of a grey color and secondly we have Gigabyte etched across the heatsink.
The card doesn’t have to look totally different from nVidia’s reference to be good though as nVidia’s reference card isn’t available to the retail market and most of the time what differs amongst the brands isn’t much more then their package and price.
Like the reference cards, we have Dual DVI on offer so anyone wanting to get some dual DVI LCD action happening on their desktop should be looking forward to taking advantage of this feature.
Gigabyte hasn’t done anything with the core/memory speed of the cards so we are looking at reference speeds of 430MHz on the core and 1300MHz on the 256MB DDR3 memory.
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