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Graphics Software Hardware Entertainment Games

NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS For AGP Launched 126

Posted by Zonk from the upgrade-now-and-play-fear dept.
Spinnerbait writes "Although new system sales with AGP slots are almost non-existent these days in the consumer desktop space, there is a still a fair aftermarket demand for upgrades in the retail area where AGP enabled motherboards abound. Although PCI Express is the mainstay interface for most new cards from graphics giants like NVIDIA and ATI, NVIDIA unwrapped a fairly high end card dubbed the GeForce 7800 GS, in an AGP variant. 16 pixel shaders engines and DX9 SM3.0 graphics compliant hardware in the latest GPU architecture from NVIDIA now available in AGP."
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NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS For AGP Launched More

NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS For AGP Launched

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  • When will they be releasing drivers for Linux, BSD and Solaris that support this card?

    • Re:Solaris, Linux, BSD drivers? (Score:5, Informative)

      by l33t.g33k ( 903780 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @11:30AM (#14634937)
      You can probably check for Linux/BSD/Solaris drivers from Nvidia's website. The drivers you can find here: http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp [nvidia.com]

      Currently they only have Windows XP/2000 drivers for it, but I would imagine that the Linux etc. drivers will be available soon.
      • Indeed, I know full well that I can get drivers from their web site. I'm just not willing to buy a hardware product from them until they offer accelerated drivers for it.

        Has anyone tried the Solaris drivers with other nVidia cards? I have gotten the Linux ones to work well, but the ones for FreeBSD were problematic. About six months ago I ported some visualization software from aging IRIX systems to Linux for a client. We used an nVidia card (I don't recall the exact model) in an Opteron system, and the acc
        • I have an Ultra 20 with the nVidia NVS540 card. It seems to work pretty well, but I don't really do a lot of graphically-intensive work, and I've never used a generic driver, so I can't guess what the speedup is. I'm not sure what you're looking for, quality-wise: getting the absolute best performance, or no noticable bugs? The graphics were snappier under CDE than the (GNOME-based) Java Desktop System, but then again CDE is, what, ten years old? (It looks unchanged from the version I used on HP/Apollo
          • Part of the problem may also be that GNOME isn't exactly the most well-written software out there. Their attempt to build an object model around C has often been listed as a main cause of the poor performance. A C++ compiler, even those which translate C++ code to C, can take into account the object model supported by C++, and can perform various optimizations. A C compiler has no awareness of the object model that GNOME uses, and hence is not at liberty to perform such optimizations. That is why we see a d
          • I'm not sure if this utility is included in Solaris, but under Linux if you open an Xterm and then run glxgears, and leave it run without moving your mouse for a while, then close the window with the moving gears, you will see the FPS in the Xterm window. Of course, the drivers could be buggy as shit still, like some versions of Nvidia's for Linux (which were promptly fixed I might add).

    • Re:Solaris, Linux, BSD drivers? (Score:4, Informative)

      by GweeDo ( 127172 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @11:44AM (#14635051) Homepage
      They are already out [nvidia.com]

      Nvidia has always been good about getting Linux drivers out for desktop parts.
      • I must say, nVidia is IMO leaps and bounds ahead of ATI in its linux support. I can say that nVidia's linux compatability alone was about 50% of my decision to switch from ATI. I've got a dual boot (Win XP / Fedora Core 4) AMD 64 3500, geForce 7800 GT, 1GB RAM and it performs beautifully under both OSes.

    • Why would you want such a high end card for a linux box? The only thing that can take full advantage of a card like this is high end gaming. Since there are no such games available for linux, bsd, and soloairs I fail to see the reason you want to put this card in such a box. Are there any graphics applications under linux that would take advantage of it?

      I have a nvidia 128MB card in my linux box that I paid 40 bucks for. It's blindingly fast under Xwindows. I would rather buy a modest priced graphic

      • Well, I personally consider Doom3 to be a pretty highend game. Plus, I've gotten games working through Wine that ended up using the Linux drivers provided by Nvidia.
      • Since there are no such games available for linux, bsd, and soloairs

        Doom 3, Quake 4, Unreal in its various versions, America's Army are all available for Linux, and, by extension, for FreeBSD at least.

        Are there any graphics applications under linux that would take advantage of it?

        Blender, Maya come to mind; surely there are others.

  • I'd prefer a review that compared it w/ ATI x850 (Score:5, Informative)

    by aapold ( 753705 ) * on Friday February 03, 2006 @11:26AM (#14634902) Homepage Journal
    You know, an actual competing product instead of an older product from the same company...

    Say, like, the one at Anandtech [anandtech.com].

    Amazing how different a part can come across in two different review/tests... I mean, Anand still shows it worthy, on the strength of being a little cheaper than the x850, but it is in perspective. The review linked makes it look like an AGP renaissance...
    • One interesting thing that I noted in those two reviews is that both of them use AMD processors... it looks like AMD has replaced Intel as the highend gaming CPU. A more complete benchmark will include a test with two similar systems with different processors (equivalent).

      • Re:I'd prefer a review that compared it w/ ATI x85 (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Ryan Amos ( 16972 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @12:07PM (#14635262)
        Welcome to 2 years ago. The Athlon 64 is the best desktop chip available.

        But these days desktops are only about 50% of the market, and AMD really has nothing to compete with in the portable market. It's starting to shape up as AMD = desktops and servers; Intel = compact desktops (iMac) and laptops.

        The only reason Intel has a presence in the desktop market is Dell. Just wait until Dell gives in; AMD is currently building their new corporate HQ in Austin about 10 miles down the freeway from Dell's in Round Rock (RR is a suburb of Austin.) It's only a matter of time.
        • But these days desktops are only about 50% of the market, and AMD really has nothing to compete with in the portable market.

          AMD is slightly behind, only because they didn't jump to 65nm as fast as Intel. When they do (shortly) by all accounts they should jump right past Intel.

          The idea that AMD doesn't have good mobile processors was from 5+ years ago, and wasn't completely true back then anyhow.
          • Maybe not in CPU speeds, but in performance testing and battery life, Intel still has a pretty good advantage.

            In desktop gaming AMD generally beats the snot out of Intel - you can see that by reading the CPU testing here [tomshardware.com], so it's no surprise (to me, at least) that high end gamer rigs prefer AMD.
            • I think it depends on the games you play too. Its similar to video card choice. If you buy games from a company that favors AMD or reacts quickly to whats popular, then AMD chips would be the best choice. If you play a few year old games, or from a vendor that favors intel its more logical to buy intel. Likewise, some companies optimize for ATI and others nVidia.

              The other factor is what operating systems you intend to use and the motherboard chipset. Gamer rigs are often custom built and therefore gamers
            • Maybe not in CPU speeds, but in performance testing and battery life, Intel still has a pretty good advantage.

              No, AMD's mobile Athlon-64s were faster as well as lower power than anything Intel had to offer... before the Duo came out. When AMD releases their next generation of chips, you can expect that to be the case once again.
            • High end gaming rigs are AMD becasue AMD is cool and not 'the man'.
              The performance difference for games is not noticable by human beings.

              • Re:Don't kid yourself (Score:3, Informative)

                by ejito ( 700826 )

                The performance difference for games is not noticable by human beings.

                You obviously don't play many games. Or at least not ones that require movement and aiming.

                The difference between 24 frames per second (FPS) and 60 FPS is enormous, and easily visible. The difference between 60 FPS and 80 FPS (usually corresponding to the monitor's refresh rate) is also noticable if you play enough games. Even if vertical refresh limited, FPS is noticible past 60. Past around 80 fps, the lag becomes indistinguishable for

                • A constant 24 FPS with proper motion blur provides a vastly higher quality picture than when you have varying framerates from 20fps to 60fps and no motion blur.

                  It's not that video games aren't reasonably playable at 40fps, it's that an average frame length of 1/40th of a second with a 100% standard deviation is really horrible - and a higher end video card will give you frames of 1/60th of a second with a 25% stdev.

                • He said, "High end gaming rigs are AMD becasue AMD is cool and not 'the man'.
                  The performance difference for games is not noticable by human beings." And you went on to blather on about how something with twice the frame rate is perceivably better. Great point--if AMD produced twice the framerate as intel. They don't. The race isn't nearly that far apart my sad sad little friend.
                  • CPU bottlenecks between processors can produce 10 fps differences depending on the game, more than enough to see. Often the game will choke and produce slowdowns with differences greater than double between two comparative processors.

                    Click if you want a current example [firingsquad.com] The bottleneck for the higher resolutions is the videocard. You'd see an even larger difference between FPS in CPU intesive games like BF2, and in future games that'll require more processing. Other benchmarks (such as Tom's Hardware's CPU ch

          • AMD is slightly behind, only because they didn't jump to 65nm as fast as Intel. When they do (shortly) by all accounts they should jump right past Intel.

            That pretty much sums up one of the main two advantages Intel has over AMD - superior process and manufacturing capabilities. Unfortunately for AMD, even as they transition to use 65 nm processes, Intel is about a generation ahead of them, with the first batch 45nm chips due next year. AMD's superior design helps on the desktop front, but they really n

            • superior process

              Ever heard of SOI? Because it seems that Intel hasn't.

              Unfortunately for AMD, even as they transition to use 65 nm processes, Intel is about a generation ahead of them, with the first batch 45nm chips due next year.

              That could turn out to be a completely bullshit number on Intel's part... or not. Until they're really being sold, it's just vapor.

              Intel's wiping them in the notebook arena at the moment.

              That's just nonsense. Intel has a fairly small advantage over AMD with the Core Duo, and tha

              • "audio/video encoding"--Both of those have been able to benefit massively from multiple processors for some time. Infact both of these operations are damn near 100% parallelizable.
                • "audio/video encoding"--Both of those have been able to benefit massively from multiple processors for some time. Infact both of these operations are damn near 100% parallelizable.

                  Not true. Threading of video encoding results in a significant quality loss, and there's no practical way to eliminate that trade-off.

                  You clearly have never written a video codec...
              • Unfortunately for AMD, even as they transition to use 65 nm processes, Intel is about a generation ahead of them, with the first batch 45nm chips due next year.

                That could turn out to be a completely bullshit number on Intel's part... or not. Until they're really being sold, it's just vapor.

                Intel and AMD both pull off a process shrink on average once every 2 years. Intel's schedule is usually about a year ahead of AMD's. It's certainly possible that Intel will run into huge problems and fall behind AMD,
        • The matter of time has been over a decade. It's not like the AMD HQ and fabs haven't been located in Austin. Dell just has a pole up his ass about Intel's sweetened processor price deal
        • Dell is now selling AMD processors from its website. Go to dell.com and type AMD in the search, it's the top result.
    • After all, there are reasons to not want to go to ATi. Linux support being a big one people areound here would care about. Personally, I'm switching back to nVidia here soon, despite using Windows. ATi's Windows drivers aren't bad, they are fairly stable, but they aren't as rock solid as nVidia's drivers. For example the GPU occasionally crashes in WoW. It recovers and your system doesn't go down, but it still shouldn't happen. It's an ATi only problem.

      The card I'd actually be more interested in comparisons
    • The only meaningful card in the AnandTech review is the ATI x850. How could they POSSIBLY put together a 7800GS review and not put in a 6800GS as comparison. The 6800GS was the fastest nVidia AGP card available prior to the 7800GS, and anybody looking at upgrading their AGP based system is going to be choosing between the 6800GS or 7800GS (or an ATI solution).

      To not have an older, usable, nVidia card as a comparison makes the review worthless.

  • Not worth It. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Jaruzel ( 804522 )
    Modern graphics cards need super beefy machines under them to perform at their full potential. Therefore sequeezing the latest NIVDIA card (that will cost hundreds of pounds/dollars) into a 3-4 year old machine will only result in dissapointment, tears, and a 5-6 average fps.

    -Jar.
    • Well my 18 month old Asus A8V board supports the the latest AMD Dual Core processors (AMD64 4800+), does Dual Channel DDR RAM and has a AGP port. Does this mean it's not as powerful as the latest PCIe system? I think more likely, PCIe was introduced to make the fools with more money than sense go and buy new Mobos and graphics cards....
      • I think more likely, PCIe was introduced to make the fools with more money than sense go and buy new Mobos and graphics cards....

        One of the greatest performance problems with graphics cards has always been bandwidth. Current generation PCIe adds a 25% increase in bandwidth over the fastest AGP ports on the market. (AGP 8x). It compares even more favorably with the more common AGP 4x ports.

        So as long as you're looking to get maximum performance to run the latest games at their highest quality settings, then
        • I thought the increase was in bus bandwidth, and that was only used when tranferring large textures that are too big for the graphics card's onboard memory, so the main memory can be used. Seing as most GPU's of this calibre are 256MB, I think a 25% performance increase is only likely if your handling large (>256MB textures). Again, I may be totally wrong, but does anyone know? I suppose the question is. Given 2 cards, 1xAGP implementation, 1xPCIe implmentation, with the same GPU, and asusming that t
      • PCI Express only became widely available for AMD about 18 months ago. There are plenty of 939 boards out there with an AGP slot, and therefore plenty of systems out there that are AGP only and more than beefy enough to run a 7800 GS.

    • Bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EvilCabbage ( 589836 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @11:37AM (#14634993) Homepage
      You're assuming only three and four year old machines have AGP slots?

      For a great number of reasons my most recent PC ended up with an AGP slot, it's less than 12 months old. This kind of card may just be a worth addition.

      Hell, out of a dozen or so associates I can only name one that has a PCIE graphics setup.

      • Re:Bullshit. (Score:3, Informative)

        by dubbreak ( 623656 )
        Good point.

        I'd like to also add that there are pleny of socket 939 boards with AGP, and s939 won't be gone for a while yet, so it is possible to have an up-to-date processor with an AGP slot.

        Also socket 754 chips are available upto an A64 3700+, which should be good for most games in the near future. Most socket 754 boards are AGP (although you can get PCI-e ones now).

      • Re:Bullshit. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Feanturi ( 99866 )
        The last time I went to get a new video card though, about two months ago, I had a rough time getting a GeForce 6800 for AGP. The store I usually deal with had had several AGP cards in their stock when I had started thinking about getting a new card, but by the time I got around to actually going to get one, they didn't have one single AGP card in stock, regardless of manufacturer or model. I had to get them to order me one, and was told that I was lucky too because the source they ordered my BFG-made 6800

    • Re:Not worth It. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by harryk ( 17509 )
      On the other side though, what about the remainder of us who already have (I'm not one of them) decent systems, but don't have PCI-E expansion slots. Consider the entire group of pre-64 bit users with beefy systems that have been left without an upgrade path for their video card.

      I agree that newer GPU will continue to require larger and beefier systems to push the data to them (after all gameplay is still handled by the CPU), but you should not discredit them for providing a product that is quite viable.

      Wh

    • Re:Not worth It. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by danpsmith ( 922127 )

      Modern graphics cards need super beefy machines under them to perform at their full potential. Therefore sequeezing the latest NIVDIA card (that will cost hundreds of pounds/dollars) into a 3-4 year old machine will only result in dissapointment, tears, and a 5-6 average fps.

      The best way, I find, as a casual gamer that doesn't need to pay the games at the highest possible resolution, etc. Is to just buy a 100-200 dollar video card every 2-3 years. A mediocre video card can usually play modern games jus

      • I'm right there with you. When the Nvidia Ti series debuted, I jumped on a Ti4200 (still one of the best speed-wise). Later I upgraded to a GeforceFX 5900LE. Now I have a dual 6600 SLI-on-a-card (Gigabyte 3dv1). All of these choices are under $200 and are middle-of-the-road, but all of them, especially this 6600 SLI card, have performed wonderfully.

          Just a side note, 2 gigs of ram for any Battlefield 2 player makes a huge difference.
      • Indeed. I bought a 6800 GT awhile back when they first came out which was $400, upgrading from a GF3. I found it was way more card than I needed at the time to play doom 3 and whatever other games that were out at the time. It's still more than adequate even now.

        I now wish would have waited for a cheaper card. (but the 6600 series wasn't announced yet). In the end, I justified the card by me being enganged, so I figured I might not be able to upgrade for a awhile.

        I did however play a similar game with m
    • Actually I am running a GeForce 6600 GT on my nForce 2 board (an Albatron) and it looks great running City of Heroes. I get some frame rates (30+) and I have all of the effects and detail maxed out. Also I reccomend 256MB of memory, if you think about it with PCIe you get more memory bandwidth but once the texture or vertex data is loaded on the card the memory bandwidth between the system and the card doesn't matter anymore...

    • The other white meat (Score:2, Informative)

      by UttBuggly ( 871776 )
      While I would agree there's an inverse function of CPU to graphic card power, it's not as bleak as that!

      I have an "antique" 700Mhz Athlon machine with an AGP slot...which was "new technology" when I bought/built the machine. It originally had a VooDoo 3 AGP card, then an Nvidia 4200. Has a Radeon 9600XT now. While it's mostly used as an iTunes server these days, I still play Wolfenstein, America's Army, and a ton of other games on it. I get pretty darn good frame rates.

      My main box is a "beefy" Athlon 64, 2G
    • Really?

      Then why does everyone see higher benchmark numbers in FPS with this card?

      Just because it has AGP does not mean it's not "super beefy"

      Hell I used to kick the crap out of the newbies with daddy's money at college showing off their "then new" P4 systems. My lowly old P-III 800 kicked the crap out of theirs at every turn in gaming.

      If your bottleneck is not the processor or the interface then you will see a major improvement.
    • and a 5-6 average fps.

      Bullshit. My three year old HP Desktop with an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 AGP card gets around 1800 FPS (with the Linux drivers). The Windows drivers seem to perform better, although I haven't tested the actual FPS. I'm going to assume you were exaggerating there.
  • Most of the systems at work and at home (even my friends) are mainly AGP. Besides the so-called "performance increase". Isn't it just a big ploy to get people to spend $$ on a new system? High end AGP cards were almost impossible to find except on ebay, and those were going for exorbitant prices (higher than the equivalent PCI-E card, sometimes by a LOT).
    • Of course they want you to buy new(er) stuff, we are a consumer society after all.
      Personally, I would like to have some hardware standards that don't change with the seasons. Maybe there is an improvement, but that doesn't mean that the we will see the difference.

    • Re:Why is there such a big push to PCI-E anyways? (Score:5, Informative)

      by HoneyBunchesOfGoats ( 619017 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @11:44AM (#14635057)
      It's an improvement over AGP in many ways. PCI-E is a fast bi-directional point-to-point bus, so that enables neat things like multi-card SLI (multiple graphics cards rendering different parts of the same image for increased performance; they can talk to each other over the bus without having to go through the chipset first). Also, from what I understand, PCI-E is much easier to implement electrically than parallel protocols like AGP & PCI; therefore, it's cheaper for both card makers and motherboard makers to implement. Finally, the PCI-E graphics card slot can deliver a good deal more wattage through the connector than AGP can.
      • The bi-directional nature of PCIe is particularly useful for general purpose GPU operations, where reading the results back over AGP is currently a bottleneck. Another nice thing about PCIe is that it is designed you can have more than one slot in a system (AGP is limited to one card), which means that it can be used for other things than graphics. Some people here may remember that PCI was originally just (or, at least, mainly) for graphics, but fairly quickly the bandwidth requirements of other things i
        • Mmm, I'm pretty sure PCI was always envisioned as a general-purpose slot rather then being dedicated to the graphics card.

          We started with 8-bit ISA, later expanded to 16-bit ISA slots. Then EISA, MCA and VESA fought for a while (early 90s). PCI came out a bit after VESA (and pushed VESA out of the market). Then in mid-90s, Intel started to talk up the AGP slot as a dedicated graphics port. PCI-X showed up in the late 90s (maybe as late as 2000-2001?) and now PCIe.

          I think AGP came out about 2 years a
    • Way back when I got my 6600GT I remember paying about $30.00 more for the AGP version over the same PCIe one.

      I've noticed over time that the price for the AGP card has gone up. Not a lot, but still odd for a video card.
  • And here I was thinkin I needa go build a new machine...no longer!
    • Back in November, I went to a local computer show, and set out to build a new computer. The overwhelming majority of motherboards on sale didn't even have an AGP slot, which meant I couldn't use my 256MB AGP card that my previous machine couldn't handle.

      I eventually found one seller, and ended up with a decent system. Fortunately, the motherboard has a PCI-Express slot, so the next graphics card I get won't be AGP.

  • Other reviews/articles (Score:4, Informative)

    by karvind ( 833059 ) <karvind.gmail@com> on Friday February 03, 2006 @11:42AM (#14635033) Journal
    Tomshardware [tomshardware.com]

    Anandtech [anandtech.com]

    Techreport [techreport.com]

    Neoseeker [neoseeker.com]

    • Its the only one that shows just how spanked this card gets compared to the pci express models. My interest was to see if I could upgrade my system and get similar numbers to an P.E. setup. These benchmarks undeniably show that isn't possible. My recommendation would to be to just hold off and get a new system at some point.
      • Yeah, I'm torn about this new video card. I like the performance increase, but in perspective its really nothing special. In some games, you can raise it a resolution or two, but others see much less improvement.

        Anyway, even though I was tempted to buy this card when I first read about it, after some perspective I realized that I should tough it out a year and buy a proper upgrade. I mean, my AGP 6600 GT isn't a performance powerhouse, but it DOES still play games like Fable and Quake 4 acceptably at 102
  • One problem we ran into with our sample though, was that the shroud was making contact with the fan's blades, causing the fan to spin incorrectly. We feel this is an isolated incident, and we don't expect it to be a wide spread problem.

    Yeah, try and tell that to the headless shrouds I see all the time just wandering the earth aimlessly.
  • Try thinking outside the box a little. Instead of complaining that "I need to buy a new machine just to use this even faster video card", think like me in the fact that with new tech, price drops occur on the older but still great video cards. I think this is a great thing.
    • I completely agree on this one. I used to think that my fianceé's computer was going to be too old and slow (an AMD XP 1700+) to run her new favorite game (Rollercoaster Tycoon 3), but I realized that it's not as CPU intensive as I figured. She had a GeForce 440 MX in there and I had to scale everything back. I borrowed a GF4200 from a friend and dropped it in there and now I can crank pretty much every detail setting through the roof and still make it play fast enough for her (picky) tastes.

      Lesson
  • Who cares if its 5 pounds of silicon jammed into a 3 pound bag. This release means the 6800 GS in AGP just dropped in price. If you still have an nforce2 board or socket A system, that's the upgrade to grab. I've got the regular 6800 and it runs just about everything I want.

  • A link for more reviews and comments (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tayhimself ( 791184 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @11:52AM (#14635125)
    http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=280 16/ [beyond3d.com] has links for a number of reviews along with informative comments.

    Basically this is a ho-hum card at a high price. You can get a PCIe 7800GT + Motherboard bundle from vendors like EVGA for around $350. The 7800GT is a 20 pipeline / 16 ROP card, while the 7800 GS is a 16/8. Its no contest which is faster. You can use your old DDR and CPU with the new MB making it a no brainer to avoid the 7800GS.

    • Re:A link for more reviews and comments (Score:5, Informative)

      by ocbwilg ( 259828 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @12:32PM (#14635474)
      Basically this is a ho-hum card at a high price. You can get a PCIe 7800GT + Motherboard bundle from vendors like EVGA for around $350. The 7800GT is a 20 pipeline / 16 ROP card, while the 7800 GS is a 16/8. Its no contest which is faster. You can use your old DDR and CPU with the new MB making it a no brainer to avoid the 7800GS.

      I may be mistaken, but those combo deals from EVGA are for Socket 939 Athlon 64 systems. If you don't have a Socket 939 CPU already, then you have to buy a new CPU, which adds about $200 to your price.

      Personally, I have been weighing a similar decision for some time. I have a Socket 754 Athlon 64 and an old 9700 AGP card. I have been eyeing the 6800GS AGP as an upgrade, but it costs around $230 while the PCI-E version can be had for about $195. After looking around, I found that you could get a decent Gigabyte-brand S754 PCI-E mainboard for around $65. So I could spend $230 on an AGP card that I won't be able to use if I ever want to upgrade my CPU/Mainboard, or I could spent $260 for a PCI-E version of that card and a PCI-E mainboard for my current CPU. Or a 7800GT for $295 and a PCI-E S754 mainboard for $65 comes out to roughly the price of the 7800GS. Those seem like no-brainers to me, but only because I have a CPU that could be re-used. If you have a socket A or socket 478 CPU, you wouldn't have those options.
      • I just did some checking, and it looks like the EVGA combo deal is no longer available.

      • So I could spend $230 on an AGP card that I won't be able to use if I ever want to upgrade my CPU/Mainboard, or I could spent $260 for a PCI-E version of that card and a PCI-E mainboard for my current CPU. Or a 7800GT for $295 and a PCI-E S754 mainboard for $65 comes out to roughly the price of the 7800GS. Those seem like no-brainers to me, but only because I have a CPU that could be re-used. If you have a socket A or socket 478 CPU, you wouldn't have those options. Yeah you`re absolutely right, and a PCIe

      • Don't know how much you're willing to spend, but you could go the route I just went. Bought a Jetway GT Dual board...supports both socket 754(only has 2 single channel DDR) and 939(4 dual channel ddr). It has 1 16x PCI-e. Good option if you already have a 754 and want to upgrade to 939 in the future(which I'll do when socket M is released and 939s drop). For $85 it's not too bad of a deal.
        • Don't know how much you're willing to spend, but you could go the route I just went. Bought a Jetway GT Dual board...supports both socket 754(only has 2 single channel DDR) and 939(4 dual channel ddr). It has 1 16x PCI-e. Good option if you already have a 754 and want to upgrade to 939 in the future(which I'll do when socket M is released and 939s drop). For $85 it's not too bad of a deal.

          I looked at that for quite awhile but decided against it. From all of the materials that I have seen it appears that
      • I've usually found that upgrading the main board generally means replacing most of the system anyway, for a normal upgrade cycle (2-5 yrs) rather than gamer's upgrade cycle (seemingly 0.5-1 yr).

        When the memory system has usually been updated, it doesn't make sense to throttle the upgrade by keeping the old, slower memory. When it is all said and done, I think it is generally better to sell the computer and buy or assemble a new one than it is to upgrade the main board because it often means replacing every
        • When the memory system has usually been updated, it doesn't make sense to throttle the upgrade by keeping the old, slower memory. When it is all said and done, I think it is generally better to sell the computer and buy or assemble a new one than it is to upgrade the main board because it often means replacing everything else too.

          Generally I would say yes, but there are some cases where it makes sense. In my case I've had a video card for three years and I'm hitting the wall on performance. Normally I
    • You can get a PCIe 7800GT + Motherboard bundle from vendors like EVGA for around $350.

      Many of the people to whom this would appeal would need to budget for a new CPU as well, right? Or are there a lot of PCIe Athlon XP mother boards?

      Never mind having to reinstall everything, as opposed to just sticking in a new card.

    • Basically this is a ho-hum card at a high price. You can get a PCIe 7800GT + Motherboard bundle from vendors like EVGA for around $350. The 7800GT is a 20 pipeline / 16 ROP card, while the 7800 GS is a 16/8. Its no contest which is faster. You can use your old DDR and CPU with the new MB making it a no brainer to avoid the 7800GS.

      I have a P4T533 motherboard. How am I supposed to fit the Socket 478 CPU and 232-pin RDRAM into the EVGA card? That's right, I can't. So I would have to buy a new motherboard

  • I have a new Dell laptop with the following:
    1.83ghz Core Duo cpu
    1GB RAM
    256MB Geforce 7800go GPU

    I am VERY happy with the GPU's performance in everything I throw at it. I currently have a Geforce 6600GT in my desktop and might consider upgrading to a card like that after using this laptop. Does anyone know how the performance of the Go parts compares to these?

    I have a Athlon XP-2100 as a CPU at home for reference.
    • As far as I know, a Geforce 7800 Go performs very similar to a 7800 GT desktop part on PCI-E, therefore, its the fastest mobile GPU at the moment (until X1900 Mobility releases next month)

      Even with the Athlon XP 2100+, you'll see benefits, although lower resolutions it wont look much difference, since its CPU tied, and the 6600GT would be already as well. Its when you turn on features like FSAA and Anisotopic filtering you will see a speed difference, whereas the 6600GT will drop to a lower FPS, the 7800

  • I wish (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Trikenstein ( 571493 )
    That they had shown the control panels. Especially those that control overlay. A lot of folks use their computers for watching TV and DVDs these days.

    I originally switched to ATI products because their overlay controls were more intuitive and had a more vibrant overlay.

    I hear that nVidias overlay IQ is much better these days, but it'd be nice to know whether their overlay controls had been redesigned.

  • Nice card...but i dont think ill upgrade. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by techmedic ( 889980 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @11:58AM (#14635174)
    This looks like a great card for someone with a AGP slot and a decent cpu to team up with the card, but if i did get this card it would be going in my game machine at the office. Just a AMD XP3000 which now has just a 5900 in it. All ive been doing is Guild Wars lately (when im working of course)and the game plays great on what ive got. This card will most likely be put into systems with slower CPU's and older motherboards and chipsets. Would be interesting to see a review that maybe showed how the card scales with a wide range of older and recent processors (didnt check any other reviews other than the HH link). Lets say from the XP2000 on up to recent chips (on the AMD side). Just som people know that they wont be wasting there money by tossing this card in there older machine.
  • naturally, it comes from theinq and i can't seem to find a link to it at the moment, but i read in some article on there a couple days ago that over 50% of new motherboards shipped are still shipping with AGP slots as opposed to PCI-E. That's all i've got since i can't find the story, but i'm not entirely sure the sales are "almost non existent." Or maybe I misunderstood the statement.

  • Dual DVI support needed (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    These high end cards seriously need dual DVI support. This 7800 comes with DVI and DSUB connectors. This is useless in my opinion for the amount of money it costs.
  • I just wanted to inform you that http://www.technologysweden.com/ [technologysweden.com] also has a review (Swedish) of the EVGA 7800 GS Co Superclock it got 10 out of 10 in the judgement. And it also got the Technology Sweden - Recommends award. The EVGA card is 20% overclocked from the factory and the results almost matches a single 7800GTX on the PCI-E platform.
  • I was in the market for a new AGP card for the holidays, since moving to PCI-E meant I would have to replece the mob AND the CPU. Like someone else posted, I couldn't find a decent NVidia AGP card on the market except on eBay, for at least a hundred dollars over retail price. I ended up going with an ATI X850 Pro on sale on Buy.com for $230 after instant rebate.

    Nvidia has already lost me as a customer (at least for the time being). I was pretty upset that they nearly dropped all AGP platforms so they c

    • interesting. My local Fry's electronic has shelves of AGP nVidia cards.

      And quite frankly, the nVidia help and driver support is superiour to ATI.
      • Agreed re: NVidia's superiority, but my Fry's was either out or way overpriced ($100+ over online prices), unless I wanted a cheap 6600 series stopgap (was looking for something with better specs).

        I'm an nVidia fan, but after scouring NewEgg, Froogle, Amazon, PriceWatcher, and local stores for a decent 6800 series card, and comming up empty handed or seeing $350+ prices, I was a bit dissapointed.

  • Its frustrating to see a 350$ card with only one DVI connector on it. (Please ship cards with two and an analog adapter.)

    People wanting to run two flat panels on their (AGP) system are going to have one less-than-crisp display, or run a 6600GT.

    I'd really like to upgrade off my Ti4800SE, but I want dual DVI.
  • I noticed the card is a lower version of the GT, so is AGP bandwidth maxed on this card?

    I'd like to know if they are justified in upgrading to PCI-E or waiting.
  • Anybody know what this card sells for?

  • Nice to see. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sylver Dragon ( 445237 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @03:23PM (#14636883) Journal
    A couple years back I invested quite a bit of money in a high-end gaming rig. At the time, I bought a GF4ti4600, which was about the top end (4800 was not announced yet). Since then, I've not had much need to upgrade. The processor is a 2.26Ghz P4 on the 533FSB, 1GB DDR RAM (I forget the RAM speed off the top of my head). Even now, with the system 3ish years old, most of the upgrades for it would be incrimental. Yes, I could move to a faster FSB and faster RAM, but it wouldn't be enough of a performance gain to justify the cost. I'm also willing to play at less than maximum resolution.
    Recently, I wanted to try BF2, but could not because it requires a full DX9 card, which the GF4 line is not. My problem was, that I only have an AGP slot. And I'm not willing to do the whole mobo/proc upgrade for one game. It's nice to see that Nvidia is still willing to support those of use who don't want to replace everything constantly. When I build myself a new machine, I always try to build-in an upgrade path, so that I can streach my investment out over a longer period.

    • I wouldn't bother with anyting higher then a $150 dollar dx9 card from nvida or ati. Whether it's a 6600gt or whatevers best in that price range.

      A 7800gs is far too powerful, expensive, and won't perform near it's full potential on your system.
      • I ended up getting the 6600GT, I wasn't going to dump more than $150 on a video card upgrade at this point (and I did this back around Christmas). Though, one factor I was looking at was the possibility of doing the mobo/processor thing slowly. i.e. Buy a mobo with both PCIe and AGP slots, which would support the rest of my current hardware; then, probably move to faster RAM eventually. After that, the processor could follow. At which point, I will probably be getting ready to do the video card again, a

      • Re:A different card (Score:3, Interesting)

        by node159 ( 636992 )
        How is a 7800 an overkill for a AMD +3200, nForce2 MB, and 2GB of ram? Currently I have a FX 5600 which just can't hack the new games at the res's I've become acustomed to. The APG 7800 is a god send, even if I don't end up buying it, the cost of the 6800 Ultra is significatly reduced.

        Some people have such a narrow mind set.
        • I'm pretty sure i was addressing the parent directly. The parent acknowledged and replied nicey. I'm not sure why your here to spew your nonsense.

          In my post i addressed his case specifically, not yours. In your case you'd probably see a higher performance with a ti4600 on many games that are not dx9+. The geforce 5000 line was pretty horrible. It was the one time ati beat them hands down in all pricepoints for almost all games.

          In your case, yes i'd buy a 6800 ultra as it would be a massive speedboost.
  • Wow, I'm amazed. I have been out of the graphics card market for some time, and thought AGP cards had lost their value, as everything seems to be PCI-E these days.

    I thought I had a collector's item, the fastest AGP video card ever made. No more.

    "Back when I had money" I bought an Asus V9999 Ultra Deluxe. Exorbitant price. We're talking multiple arms and multiple legs here. Still, hard to find at that price. I Froogled it and was amazed to see that it is still holding its value! Wow. Very surprising.

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