The PC Perspective Podcast is your weekly stop for the latest PC tech news and reviews! Give it a listen!

Summary

This is a basic preview of this product intended for readers who just want the quick look at the new product.  If you are interested in the full review, with all the technical data and benchmarks that you are used to seeing on PC Perspective, please click on this link to get to that article.

Towards the end of June NVIDIA announced a new GPU architecture dubbed the G70 and became known as the GeForce 7800 GTX.  Today, during the largest LAN party event in the world, Quakecon 2005, NVIDIA is announcing a new product based on the G70 that offers the same great feature set, but with a lower price point: the GeForce 7800 GT.

XFX's 7800 GT @ 450 / 1.05

Our sample came not from NVIDIA, but instead from XFX in the form of a full retail card.  That means that NVIDIA has once again produced a “hard launchâ€� in which product is available for purchase the very same day that it is announced to the world.  Not many companies in this industry can say that about their launches over the past three or so years.

The 7800 GT is really nothing more than a trimmed down version of the 7800 GTX.  It has one fewer vertex pipelines (from 8 to 7) and four fewer pixel pipelines (from 24 to 20) and has a slightly slower clock and memory speed.  Here are the specs on the reference design from NVIDIA and the overclocked card we got straight from XFX.

	7800 GT Reference	XFX 7800 GT
Core Clock	400 MHz	450 MHz
Memory Clock	1.0 GHz	1.05 GHz
Pixel Pipes	20	20
Vertex Pipes	7	7
Memory	256 MB	256 MB

Let’s take a look at how this new GPU compares to the competition and how the XFX model compares to the reference platform put out by NVIDIA. 

You can see that while the 7800 GTX is the king of the hill, the 7800 GT does quite well for itself, besting the X850XT PE in most of the benchmarks we ran.  To see all of our test results from more games, be sure to check out our full review. 

As for pricing, though NVIDIA put out an MSRP of $449 on the card during our conference call, we actually are already seeing them for sale for under $400 on launch day!  This is a big change from the graphics card market a year ago.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to not be pleased with products like these.  NVIDIA has done magnificently with their two latest GPU releases by bringing out faster products with top shelf feature sets and having product available on launch day.  The XFX 7800 GT takes that one step further by overclocking the core and memory speeds for an even faster out of the box experience.  With the 7800 GT, performance is outstanding and even prices look a bit better. 

The 7800 GT may just win some gamers over. 

Be sure to use our price checking engine to find the best prices on the XFX 7800 GT (450/1.05) with controller, and anything else you may want to buy!

Click here for the Detailed Review