Date:
Friday , August 05, 2005
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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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.

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System Test Setup:

CPU

AMD Athlon 64 FX-55

Motherboard

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

System Memory

2 x 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro

Hard Drive

Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150

OS

Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c

Video Cards:

Make & Model

Platform

Core Clock

Memory Clock

Driver Version

Notes

2x MSI NX7800 GTX 256MB

PCIe

430MHz

1.2GHz

ForceWare 77.76

Non WHQL drivers

2x GeForce 6800 Ultra 256MB

PCIe

400MHz

1.1GHz

ForceWare 77.72

Non WHQL drivers

Radeon X850 XT-PE 256MB

PCIe

540MHz

1.18GHz

Catalyst 5.6

WHQL drivers

We’ll take the MSI NX7800 GTX and compare it to a GeForce 6800 Ultra and a Radeon X850 XT-PE. We will also take two MSI NX7800 GTX cards in SLI mode and compare them to two GeForce 6800 Ultras in SLI mode.

Game Evaluation Setup

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world game play that each video card provides. We have two sections, “Highest Playable” and “Apples to Apples.” The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. Following the Highest Playable section, we have a brief Apples to Apples performance section for those that find benefit in viewing frame rates with matching IQ. We use a high performance system with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

To look at image quality comparisons between a GeForce 7800 GTX-based video card and other cards, please read our initial preview. In that review , we examined each new Anti-Aliasing mode and looked at image quality comparisons. In this review, we will focus on game play and performance and describe any image quality differences we noted with the newer ForceWare 77.76 driver.

For our game play graphs, we will use the naming convention TR MSAA for Transparency Multisample Anti-Aliasing and TR SSAA to indicate Transparency Supersample Anti-Aliasing.