This Is One Fast Video Card!

The race for the performance crown between ATI and NVIDIA almost seems like the fable about the Tortoise and the Hare. For the past 4 months, the Hare (NVIDIA) has been taking a relaxing nap and reaping in the profits since it raised the bar with its GeForce 7800 GTX in June. Now, just as the Tortoise (ATI) catches up to the Hare riding on its new 512MB Radeon X1800 XT, the Hare awakens and revs up its own 512MB response: the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB.

EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB

Frankly, NVIDIA should have come up with a cooler sounding name than the “7800 GTX 512MB” because it sounds like all we are getting is a 7800GTX with 512MB memory right? Well, we will see that there is more in a name. EVGA’s e-GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB (P/N: 512-P2-N545-AX) is based on NVIDIA’s 7800 GTX 512MB chipset. The EVGA video card is equipped with the same 24 pipelines and 8 vertex shaders found on the standard 7800 GTX, but comes with a significantly faster core/memory clock speed of 550MHz/1700MHz respectively and 512MB of GDDR3 memory. Thus, the 7800 GTX 512MB is basically an insanely faster EVGA GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB with double the memory capacity. The EVGA card’s core is clocked 100 MHz higher than stock and the memory went up by whopping 500 MHz DDR. However specification wise, the N545 memory might have a +200 MHz edge over ATI’s X1800 XT, but the core is at a -75 MHz disadvantage.

You can read the entire review here.