Albatron GeForce 7800 GTX

Manufacturer: Albatron
Supplied by: Albatron
Estimated Price: $460.00

by Dean Barker (11/06/2005)

Introduction

NVidia’s release of the GeForce 7800 GTX took the video card performance crown by storm.  We have all heard of how the bar wasn’t raised but redefined with the incredible performance of the 7800 GTX.  Let us not forget that even higher performance is attainable if two 7800 GTXs are linking together via NVidia’s SLI mode. 

Albatron was kind enough to send over their version of this monster which doesn’t stray too far from the NVidia reference design.  In our initial tests of the Albatron 7800 GTX, we were confronted with a problem we didn’t expect.  That being of the speed of this card outstripped our test bed.  While our AMD Athlon 64 3000 processor isn’t state of the art, it was still hard to think in terms of its being a bottleneck.  In part because of this and of the shifting nature of graphical benchmarking, we had to rethink and rework our video card testing process to better address end user gaming over just a rote frame per second score.  This review will shift our testing away from traditional FPS testing of old to that of smoothness of game play.  We will explain our new methodology later in the review.  First, let’s have a look at the specifications and the physical presence of the Albatron 7800 GTX.

Specifications:

• Graphics Engine: GeForce 7800 GTX

• Interface: PCI-Express

• Engine Clock: 430 MHz

• Memory Clock: 1200 MHz

• Memory Type/Size: 256mb DDR III

• Memory Bus: 256 bit

• Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 38.4

• Fill Rate (billion pixels/sec) 10.32

• Vertices/sec (million) 860 24

• Pixels/Clock (peak)

• Vertex Units: 8

• Max Resolution: 2048 x 1536 @ 85 MHz

• VGA Output: Yes with adapter

• TV Tuner: No

• TV-out: Yes

• VIVO: Yes

• DVI: Yes

• Minimum 400w Power Supply Required

What you get

The Albatron package is a nice change from the Victoria Secret looking mermaids (not that I have any problems with Victoria Secret looking mermaids) to Mad Mod Mike, an overweight geek that does us all proud.  Opening up the box we find a rather standard bundle.  The Albatron 7800 GTX of course, manual, TV-Out Composite Cable, HDTV Cables, Power Cable Adapter,  S-Video Cable, single DVI to VGA adapter, a copy of ARX Fatalis, a copy of CyberLink Power Director 2.5, driver/tool CD and the Albatron Game Pack which includes demo versions AOWII, Max Payne, Zax, BeamBreaker and Rally Trophy.  While the game demos and games Albatron includes may or may not excite you, the value in the bundle is in the cables.  It's the sort of thing you don't think about until you're dropping $40 for specialty cables at Radio Shack.  Thanks for the forward thinking Albatron.

NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Technology / Benchmarking Setup
Pg 4 - Performance in Battlefield 2, Quake 4
Pg 5 - Performance in Doom 3, Half Life 2 and Far Cry
Pg 6 - Performance in UT2004 / Image quality / Overclocking
Pg 7 - Conclusion