Introduction
There's a new King of Consumer Graphics in town, and he goes by the name of GeForce 7800 GTX 512. NVIDIA's latest high-end hardware creation pairs a tweaked G70 and accompanying PCB, with a new dual-slot cooler and 512MiB of on-board memory, to create the fastest consumer hardware to ever process a pixel fragment. With the GPU clocked at 550MHz, as it is with 8 vertex units and 24 pixel processors, there's nothing to stop it at the time of writing. Memory clocked at 850MHz (1.7GHz DDR) keeps the chip fed with data and the larger memory size compared to the lesser GTX means there's more room for it to work in, giving outstanding performance at high resolution.
While it trails in the image quality department - on paper at least - compared to ATI's latest offerings, the hardware can still produce a great looking image and at brand new framerate levels. In short, it's as good as it gets today.
What makes it even more exciting is that NVIDIA AIB partners are allowed to go above and beyond the reference specifications if they so choose, when creating products based on the reference hardware design and clocks. XFX are one such AIB that we're used to seeing do so, releasing models overclocked out of the box for some time now. While they might not do anything adventurous with the cooling or bundle, they do aim to offer up more performance out of the box, without any special overclocking tools. Just install a driver and the XFX clock levels are available straight away, warrantied and validated by XFX for 24/7 running.
Their take on GTX 512 is no different, running out-of-spec on the GPU and memory clock. Join us as we have a look at the snappily named XFX GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB DDR3 XXX Edition. A triplet of Xs next to a product title can either mean Vin Diesel being rubbish on film, or something a little more risqué. Let's hope it's the latter.
