NVIDIA 7800 GT Mini-Roundup

Test Setup/Performance Tests

We ran a number of performance tests with these cards to give us a good idea of how well they perform relative to each other. This lets us see first-hand the actual difference between a reference factory clocked and factory overclocked card. This means that we should see the ASUS numbers slightly lower than XFX's or EVGA's. We tested three games at 1600x1200 resolution with and without AA enabled. The games that we used (Battlefield 2, Quake 4, and Halflife 2: Lost Coast) were chosen because they represent a wide range of game engines. This is the test system that we used:

NVIDIA nForce 4 motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 2.6 GHz Processor
1 GB OCZ 2:2:2:6 DDR400 RAM
Seagate 7200.7 120 GB Hard Drive
OCZ 600 W PowerStream Power Supply

You can see that in each of these games, the tests show how there isn't a great performance difference between these three cards. We find that the XFX 7800 GT OC and the EVGA 7800 GT CO show framerates that only differ for the most part by a frame or two. This is because even though they are clocked at different speeds, they are close enough to each other to fall in the same scaling frequency "plateau" that we mentioned earlier.

Essentially, what we see in these tests is that the difference in performance between a 7800 GT clocked at reference speeds and factory overclocked to 470MHz/1.1GHz or 450MHz/1.05GHz isn't enough to affect gameplay in a significant way. It's true that you can get a few fps higher in a game with an overclock like this, but it hardly ever makes it worth paying extra money for a card that's factory overclocked, especially when you can easily clock it yourself as high as or even higher than any other card out there. Interestingly though, in the case of these three 7800 GT's, the lowest clocked card (ASUS EN7800 GT) is also the highest priced, and the highest clocked card (EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GT) is the lowest price of the three.