[Dave Baumann]

With NVIDIA hitting the ground running on the introduction of the first G70 implementation, GeForce 7800 GTX, NVIDIA’s board partners have already had products based on the platform available and on slae for a month. Whilst many products based on these early samples may bear resemblance to competing vendors, BFG Tech, as they often do, have sought to distinguish themselves by offering a little more than just the standard reference specification, instead pre-overclocking the board with an extra 30MHz on the graphics core and 50MHz memory.

Here we take a closer look at BFG Tech’s GeForce 7800 GTX OC board, comparing it against the reference specification to see what extra performance the overclock can offer. Click here to read more.

[lopri]

A good read, thanks.

[Tokelil]

Originally Posted by Dave @ Overclocking page

The board tested here was able to overclock the core from its default speed of 430MHz to 489MHz, representing an 6% performance increase, whilst the memory moved from 600MHz to 675MHz, representing an 4% increase in memory bandwidth.

Did I read the first pages wrong or should this be from 460 to 489 and 650 to 675?

[Dave Baumann]

Yeah, thats a typo, but the % increases shoudl be correct (from the default OC levels). Cheers.

[trinibwoy]

Nice article. Link to this thread at the end doesn't work though (it's not even there). Why no TSAA benchmarks?

[SsP45]

They're nice cards - I've got a pair running in SLI at the moment.
________
KAWASAKI KDX200

[lopri]

What I've been always curious about is this. As far as I know, the current batch of 7800GTX's are basically all 'built by nVIDIA' cards, meaning the AIB partners get the complete cards and just change the stickers and add more stuff in the shipping boxes.

If so, how can some companies raise the clock speed to distinguish themselves? I understand that they have different firmwares/BIOS, but the hardware is the same? Do they get hand-picked boards from nVIDIA? Do they just run a risk to sell? Or false advertising? XFX even sells their GPU clocked at 490MHz and my BFG GTX gives artifacts past 500MHz. And I saw reviews where the GTX could only go up to 475MHz.

It's somewhat puzzling to me.

lop

[Dave Baumann]

Although others will often eventually sell different configs, I think you'll find that those that are offering OC boards initially are mainly those that don't are NVIDIA partners that don't sell any other manufacturers.

[Geo]

Nice read. Allowing this kind of product does argue against an Ultra showing up differentiated by clockspeed, as nearly 1/2 is probably sucked up here, on core and mem.

[Ailuros]

Nice read as all B3D reviews

Question:

Up to 16 textures per pass

Shouldn't that read 24 textures/pass? I checked and it's the same in the original G70 review.

[John Reynolds]

ROP limitation.

[Neeyik]

I thought it was an API limitation myself - 16 texture samplers per pixel, per pass.

[Bob]

Shouldn't that read 24 textures/pass? I checked and it's the same in the original G70 review.

G70 can do an unlimited number of (potentially dependent) texture reads per pass, using dynamic branching, or 65535 texture reads/pass without dynamic branching.

However, G70 can only sample within a set of 16 individual textures, per pass.

Each TEX opcode has a 4 bit field that indicates which texture to read from, but you can have an arbitrary number of TEX instruction within a shader.