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You may recall that the last time anyone's really reviewed a "new" AGP product was a while ago - for us its been over a year. Due to our time constraints and availability we did not have all the AGP variants of our cards to test against. The 7800GS is a perfect candidate to test against the ATI X800 XT, X800XL, GeForce 6800Ultra, and the 6800GT that it is slated to replace. To achieve the closest comparison possible we used a combination of results from both AGP and PCI-E platforms in order to give you some numbers to compare against some of the above mentioned cards.

While we used 2 different platforms we used the exact same CPU and clockspeeds between the two platforms. Although not a perfect comparison, the differences in performance between the AGP and PCI-E platforms will not seriously hinder your understanding of just how well the 7800GS performs. Also, those of you considering upgrading to a PCI-E platform will have an idea of just HOW well a 7800GS AGP system might perform against a similarly equipped PCI-E platform.

The test setup is as follows:

(1)

AMD 64 3700+ @ 2.7GHz
OCZ PC5000 RAM
Soltek SL-K8TPRO-939 Motherboard
Seagate Barracuda 80GB
Nvidia 6600 GT AGP
BFG 7800 GS OC AGP

(2)

AMD 64 3700+ @ 2.7GHz
OCZ PC4800 RAM
DFI-NF4 Lanparty Motherboard
Seagate Barracuda 120GB
Nvidia 6800 GT PCI-E
ASUS 7800 GT PCI-E
Sapphire X800 XL PCI-E

*All tests were run with maximum quality and detail settings*

Note: We wanted to include the 6600GT AGP card because of its relevance in today's market. MANY of you have a card of this caliber, and seeing how it stacks up against the 7800GS in high end games with high quality settings will give you a taste of just how far NVIDIA has come.

3DMark05

As you can see from the results with Fill Rate were quite good, above the X800 XL in lower resolution, but just under in the higher resolutions.

Now we see the 7800 architecture shining through as it climbs to second spot and shows a mid-point between the 6800 GT and the 7800 GT.

The 7800 GS performs well once again, although with the vertex shaders the X800 XL pulls ahead slightly in the lower resolutions and slightly lower in the higher resolutions.