Introduction
Video cards, something a lot of gamers are familiar with yet its always a tough decision when its time to buy a new one.
Now a days there are a ton of models and manufacturers to select from, but how do you know which card to buy?
First lets start of with a small amount of technical specifications about the NVIDIA 7 series and in this particular case I will be talking about the 7800GTX:
-300 Million transistors
-24 Pixel processors
-16 Texture samples per cycle
-8 Vertex processors
-Memory clock rate of 1200MHZ
-The GPU works at 450MHZ
-Dissipates less heat than the 6800 Ultra and consumes about the same amount of power
Nvidia and ATI are the leaders when it comes to GPUs or Graphics Processing Unit. Last year during the second and third quarters of 2005, NVIDIA announced the succesor to the GeForce 6 series, the 7 series based on the G70 chip.
One thing I must tell you right away is that no matter what manufacturer you get this card from, it will perform the same, of course it can perform even better when they are factory overclocked models. So as of now it should be a matter of ''What does this card offer for me?'' and ''Why should I upgrade?''.
This was a very common issue with the GeForce 6600 and 6800 series, the manufacturer made a huge difference even if the speed at which the card operated was the same.
So, back on track. I got this card around November of 2005 and it cost me 465$ US Dollars (though you can pick one up for around 300$ US Dollars). It was manufactured by 3D Fuzion and it did not include any games as other manufacturers usually do. The first thing you will notice when you get this card is that it looks incredibly neat and gorgeous, its a bit longer than your usual GPUs but I had no problem fitting it in my PC case (which is a regular and rather small case). This card will require a PCI-Express slot available on your computer.
Installing this card is not complex, it goes straight on the PCI-e slot and you connect a cable from the power supply to it, after I did this i installed the NVIDIA drivers and off to play games I was.
This card is not very noise, but if you run a game in high resolutions with settings on high (it depends on each game) at some point it will begin to make a bit more noise, this is the fan working at a faster speed to keep the card cool.
I can tell you right now this card is a gorgeous and perfectly functional model. It has worked flawlessly in my computer I have not had a single problem with it, I run my computer at a resolution of 1280X1024 and watching HD videos with this card is smooth and crisp.
Now on to the games!
Here are the specs of my computer so you get an idea of what im running:
Athlon 64 4000+
OCZ Tech 1GB Dual Channel Ram
ASUS A8N SLI
Seagata Barracuda HD
Some random PSU and case from here in Argentina
Samsung 17'' Monitor
I run the following games in 1280X1024 with all settings on highest and they run smooth as can be:
-Call Of Duty 2 (high body amounts and highest settings)
-Counter Strike Source (Everything on high)
-Half Life 2 (High settings)
-Lost Coast (Everything on high here as well)
-Far Cry
-Star Wars Battlefront
-Fable
-Rome
-Winning Eleven 9
-Halo
-Need For Speed Most Wanted
-NBA Live 2006
-Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Those games all run at 1280X1024 with all the settings in game to highest. Now notice that some of those games are more CPU intensive (Like Ghost Recon) and some dont use resources to their fullest (Like Half Life 2, an excellent engine). All these games run at 30 or more frames per second and never stutter unless i play for countless hours and the video card gets really hot.
The only game I can not run at a resolution of 1280X1024 is Battlefield 2. Mainly because the engine is a horribly programmed engine that is a resouce hog and also because it is recommended to have at least 2GB of ram for it, so I can run it at 1280X1024 with high settings if I play offline, but for online play i prefer 800X600 because even at a resolution higher than that it tends to stutter quite often.
I also use this video card to do my 3D work with Maya 7.0 and it runs smooth as well...I manage to get 10 million polygon triangles on screen before I get a small amount of on screen lag. It runs perfectly fine with it and as mentioned it allows you to have a lot of geometry on screen without the card stuttering.
