System Setup and Notes
| NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX Preview Test System | |
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 FX 2800MHz, 1MiB L2 |
| Mainboard | DFI LanParty UT nF4 SLI-D |
| Memory | 2 x 512MiB Corsair XMS3200 XL DDR-400 2.0-2-2-5 @ 400MHz |
| Disk Drive | 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA w/NCQ |
| Graphics Cards | 2 x NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 256MiB (G70) (430/600) 2 x NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MiB (NV45) (425/1100) PCI Express 8X (SLI) |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, SP2 |
| Mainboard Software | NVIDIA nForce4 Platform Driver Version 6.39 |
| Graphics Driver Software | NVIDIA ForceWare Release 75 77.62 |
Release 75 of NVIDIA ForceWare
Before I discuss the hardware used, a little on the latest ForceWare driver. NVIDIA's Editor's Day slides for the new driver, presented by the recently interrogated Ben de Waal, go over a few of the enhancements and improvements that the driver has compared to older releases.The 64-bit version of the driver is now on a par with the 32-bit build, performance of TurboCache boards is up (finally, I can review HyperMemory properly!) and SLI's profile system has had some time spent on it. More applications and games are now supported by the driver, for both GeForce and Quadro parts, and the user now has more control over what SLI rendering mode is used (when a choice is actually available). For video users there's better support for HDTVs and HDTV output resolutions (1080i in particular, apparently) and Windows Media Center gets new driver-supported extensions for controlling your hardware.
There's a whole bunch of other stuff that they claim in the presentation, which I'll endeavour to cover in another article, time permitting.
Notes
DFI's simply superb LanParty UT nF4 SLI-D was a willing host for everything, Corsair's flashy stuff assmastered the memory bus and kept everything fed with data and I kept the CPU cool with an Akasa Evo33. I'll get round to reviewing that heatsink one day, but until I do I heartily recommend it.7800 GTX versus 6800 Ultra means that, yes, I missed out a comparison to ATI's latest and greatest. X850 XT PE is a wee bit faster than a single 6800 Ultra overall, so use your imagination to guess where performance would be, relative to the boards on test. I'll leave the gaming comparison to Tarinder with this article's focus being the improvements NVIDIA made to G70, compared to NV40.
So, new GPU powered by fast CPU. Problems wise, there wasn't a single lockup, performance glitch or otherwise serious issue during testing.
Driver Images
7800 GTX's confirmed 430/1200 clocksMain driver control panel screen
Multi-display control and tooltip
Another main panel screenshot
New driver options and tooltip for transparency AA
