Vendor Cards: MSI NX7800GTX

Introduction

Hardware is caught up in an eternal struggle to achieve the absolute best quality and performance in the latest games. With games like Doom 3 or Chronicles of Riddick, you don't need to have the best graphics card to enjoy them, but in order to play them (smoothly) with the highest quality settings, you need one that's top of the line. That's where NVIDIA's 7800 series comes in. This line of graphics cards is the most powerful that you can buy right now, and we intend ultimately to test and review as many as we can get our hands on.

Our last review covered EVGA's e-GeForce 7800 GTX, and this, the second in our series, will be on the MSI NX7800 GTX (VT2D256E). We are planning to review more and more variations of the 7800, and add them to the mix to see how they all stack up against each other. This will hopefully give you a good idea of which of these cards will best suit your needs.

Again, we'll be looking at heat, power draw and noise levels for the card. We'll also see how well the card performs with and without overclocking, and how it stands up to EVGA's 7800 and our reference G70. We've also added a set of tests with 4xAA enabled for comparison in the performance tests section.

Now that we have a second card in our series, we'll be looking closely at how these compare to each other. The most important factors in our decision will be performance and price. Before we get to the numbers, let's take a look at what we get out of the box.