Installation is the same as any other PCI-E graphics card: Shut off Power, open case, take out old card, insert new.  Of course it is always best to remove all drivers from the old card before powering down, and to get the latest drivers from the Nvidia website beforehand. 

Upon installing the card, after using a fanless card for some time, I have to say the fan on this card is quite loud.  I am not surprised, considering this GPU can consume a lot of power and yet is cooled by such a small fan. 

I would probably consider an aftermarket cooler on this card quite soon after purchase, which is OK for those with watercooling but another cost and complexity for those who don’t, not to mention that it voids any warranty.

The Drivers being used for this review are the 81.85 Forceware drivers from Nvidia.

Unfortunately one of the limitations of the monitor being used is that the maximum resolution is 1280 x 1024, and this is detected by all of the programs and games being benchmarked.  So the testing is limited up to this resolution, but with different features enabled.

First off, I am going to do some benchmarking using the latest graphics bench from FutureMark:  3DMark 05.  3DMark05 is a Direct X 9 based benchmarking tool to give a comparible performance rating for graphics cards and systems.

An impressive 7k score with stock settings.

Getting into the games, Half Life 2 is a fairly recent DX9 game which has some nice water effects and a good physics engine.

As you can see, it is more CPU limited, so the 7800GT is more than capable of providing maximum performance even with 4xAA and 16xAF are introduced.

One of the most demanding games around at the moment is FEAR.  This FPS is a dark single player game with amazing graphics and enough high-end settings to cripple even the highest spec machine.  Features such as Soft Shadows which are known to have a huge hit on performance are left off in this test.  In fact, I had to leave some graphics settings like Texture Detail and Shader Detail at Medium to maintain playable framerates.  All other settings for graphics were set to maximum.

The 7800GT is very capable of running FEAR at 1280x1024, but when high levels of Anti-Aliasing and Texture Filtering are enabled, the frame rate could be seen as a problem, but was still playable.  I found with 2xAA only you get the best combination of frame rates and IQ.  Visually this game is still amazing at these settings, especially with a nice 19” TFT.

Need for Speed Underground 2 is another not so recent release, which has some very high levels of detail, and an amazingly detailed world with some very nice lighting and weather effects.  I was able to run NFSU2 with all settings on the very highest for this test.

NFSU2 looked absolutely amazing, and was very playable at the highest possible quality settings at 1280x1024.  The CPU is definitely the bottleneck here again, with very little difference between resolutions.

Next Page Overclocking and Conclusion