Vendor Cards: MSI NX7800GTX

Performance Tests

Again, we're keeping with the same 3 games that we tested in the last article: Battlefield 2, Doom 3, and Half Life 2. (Half Life 2 and Doom 3 are tested at 1920x1440 and Battlefield 2 at 2048x1536.) We tested the card on the same system as the EVGA.

MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 Processor
1 GB OCZ 2:2:2:6 DDR400 RAM
Seagate 7200.7 120 GB Hard Drive
OCZ 600 W PowerStream Power Supply

As we mentioned earlier, we added a set of benchmarks with 4xAA enabled. This will help us get a better idea of the subtle differences between each card's performances. The purpose of including these benchmarks is to see what happens when stress is added to memory bandwidth on these parts. One of the first things to look at is how the numbers compare between the EVGA and MSI cards out of the box, without any overclocking. As our tests on the MSI card quickly showed no difference between its performance and that of our reference card, this question has already been answered in our previous article. Please note that we did not add an MSI NX7800 GTX entry to our graphs as our tests showed it to perform exactly the same as our reference card. NX7800GTX out-of-the-box performance is highlighted in green .

As you can see, The EVGA slightly outperforms the MSI across the board at stock speeds. This was predictable given that our EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX came to us with the core clocked at 450MHz, as opposed to MSI's standard 430MHz. When it comes to the maximum overclock, our MSI card was able to surpass what we saw with the EVGA part. With Battlefield 2, we see that the percentage gain is more pronounced without the 4xAA enabled; our NX7800GTX overclock gave us a frame rate increase of 10.4%.

Doom 3 seemed to get about the same percentage gains from overclocking with and without AA. Without AA, overclocking the MSI card returned a 5.3% gain; and with AA, we see just slightly more, 7.5%.

Half Life 2 is the reverse of Battlefield 2. We see a higher increase in performance from overclocking with AA enabled than without. This could be because we are bumping into a CPU limitation without AA turned on. With AA enabled, we see an 8.8% increase in performance when overclocked, as opposed to only a 5.3% increase with no AA.

All the gains that we see here from overclocking are fairly significant and on par with what we would expect from a 12.8% increase in core clock speed based on our analysis of clock speeds in the 7800 GTX. Of course, we know that core speed is not as straightforward a measure as we would like it to be, but we will continue to press NVIDIA on the matter.

In comparing the EVGA and MSI max core clock numbers, remember that every card is different and may not achieve the same results that we've seen here. Since these cards had the same HSF, we would expect similar overclocking performance, and hopefully the more we test, the more we'll know about how variable (in terms of max clock speed) the 7800 GTX is. It is obvious from the numbers that there is no difference in performance between a G70 clocked at 475 and one clocked at 485.