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MSI NX7800 GTX SLI Review

We take two retail MSI NX7800 GTX video cards through our gauntlet of gaming evaluations, in single card and SLI mode, to see what kind of gaming experience MSI’s top-of-the-line NVIDIA technology can provide.

Introduction:

When NVIDIA announced their next generation GeForce 7800 GTX video card, no one expected they would also have cards available for purchase on the very same day. NVIDIA is on top of the gaming world right now and there is no questioning that. They have the fastest video cards with the latest features and mass availability for gamers all around the world. We recently took a look at two reference GeForce 7800 GTXs in single and SLI configurations. Please read up on what the GeForce 7800 GTX is bringing to the PC gaming table in that review as we won’t be getting into the details behind the GPU in this review.

To summarize the features the GeForce 7800 GTX, the card utilizes a new manufacturing process at 110nm. Packed inside this piece of silicon are 302 million transistors, the highest amount known to date in a consumer video card. Providing performance are 8 vertex units feeding down to 24 pixel (fragment) pipelines, which feed down to 16 Raster Operators (ROPs). At a core frequency of 430MHz, this gives the GPU 10.3 GigaTexels/sec of pixel (fragment) fill rate. The framebuffer is comprised of 256MB of GDDR3 on a 256-bit bus at 1.2GHz offering 38.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth. All of this performance is needed to push the Shader Model 3.0 features and FP16 High Dynamic Range (HDR) support that this video card has.

Today MSI we have two retail GeForce 7800 GTX-based video cards from MSI to look at. Checking MSI’s product page, they offer two distinct models which are both SLI ready: the NX7800GTX-VT2D256E and the NX7800GTX-VTD256E (Lite). The only difference is that the “Lite” version does not include the game bundle, which consists of The Chronicles of Riddick. The version we have for review today is the regular version with The Chronicles of Riddick. Uniquely, both versions fully support Video In/Video Out (VIVO) functionality for full video capture and editing.

MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E:

MSI packaged the NX7800GTX in a silver box with a carrying handle. MSI adorns the front of the box with a simple angel graphic, along with the main key features of the video card. The box lists that this card has D.O.T (Dynamic Overclocking Technology), 256MB DDR3, TV-Out/Dual DVI, HDTV, VIVO and is PCI-Express and SLI ready. On the reverse side, MSI goes into more detail about the features of the video card and the system requirements. They also have to areas that describe the game and their D.O.T. technology.

When you slide the plastic container out of the box, you will see that the video card is firmly pressed into foam to keep it from moving. Personally, we find this foam troublesome, as you have to pry the card out of it by applying great force to the card itself as you pull it out of the foam. The cables and adapters are wrapped up and stored on top. Underneath the insert lie the software and manuals.

MSI’s design matches the layout of the GeForce 7800 GTX reference board, as no layout changes have been made. The heat sink and fan combination is the same heat-pipe combination that is on our reference boards. MSI simply screened their own faceplate for the heat sink. On the rear of the card, the brackets hold the heat sink in place and heat sink makes direct contact the RAM modules, but not the rear of the GPU. The MSI NX7800GTX is SLI ready as it has the SLI connector on top. The RAM used on the card is rated at 1.6ns, which equates to a 625MHz maximum frequency, so it gives us a little room for overclocking since the default speed of the RAM is set to run at only 600MHz.

As we mentioned earlier regarding the foam packaging, the screen shot above shows a piece of it was torn off and stuck to the video card when we removed it from the packaging. Because this card has VIVO capability, there is a multimedia port for use with the dongle provided.

Provided in each box are two DVI to VGA adapters, a PCI-Express power cable, an S-Video cable, and the multimedia cable. On this multimedia color-coded cable, each cable is labeled so they are easy to identify. The white cable is your S-Video input, the red green and blue cables are for HDTV out, the green cable also doubles as the composite (RCA) out, the orange cable is for composite (RCA) input, and the black cable is for S-Video out. This provides a whole range of possibilities for your video card to do much more than just gaming.

There is one CD and two manuals included with this bundle. The CD includes the display driver, capture drivers, MSI 3D Turbo Experience, Live Update 3, several MSI specific applications, Norton AntiVirus, ThinSoft BeTwin, Media Ring Dialer, and D.O.T. Oddly, none of the manuals explains how to install and use D.O.T.

The game The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher’s Bay (Developer’s Cut) is also included in a hard case. Note that it is the CD version and not the DVD version of the game.

We have two MSI NX7800GTXs for you today, and we will look at single and SLI performance comparisons.