Vendor Cards: EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX

Introduction

Games like Doom 3, The Chronicles of Riddick, and the ever-popular (albeit still buggy) Battlefield 2 are capable of testing the limits of even the best video cards. This is good news for people who are able to fork over the money for the hardware to make these games look good, but might be bad news for everyone else. NVIDIA's 7800 series has proven itself to be just about the best graphics card on the market and the different variations (by different manufacturers) are squeezing every last drop of performance out of NVIDIA's card.

We are going to be deviating somewhat from past articles where big video card "roundups" were the norm. Instead, this will be the first in a series of articles about cards based on NVIDIA's 7800 GTX. This will help us deal with the headaches that come with getting cards from the manufacturers and testing them all at once. The first in the series is the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX, which looks to be an impressive contender.

For this series of articles, we will be covering what each product offers out of the box. Along with this, we will be overclocking our cards and testing performance at stock and at overclocked speeds. Over time, we will be able get a good idea of how each card compares to the rest of the pack. In a way, we can think of these articles as a very large round-up stretched out over time.

In addition to overclocking, we will be looking at heat, power draw, and noise for each card. Some of these may end up looking fairly similar because many vendors tend to stick with a reference design, but expect to see a few different heat sink variations along the way that may change things up a little bit.

The final verdict will really come down to the extras that each card offers as well as the price of each card. For each article in the series, we will update our prices to reflect the current market, and we will make our recommendations based on that.

Without further ado, we bring you the first of our 7800 series reviews with the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX in all its glory.