Gainward Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample

Overclocking:

The GeForce 7800 GTX is an outstanding overclocker, which is a major reason why board partners have been able to increase their shipping core and memory clocks from the reference clocks of 430/1200MHz. Gainward's Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample comes at garaunteed clock speeds of 470/1300MHz, which is one of the highest-clocked GeForce 7800 GTX's available today.

We found that we were able to increase the clocks to 490/1340MHz, which gave us an even smoother gaming experience than before. With aftermarket cooling, you may achieve more than this, but it is also possible that products on shelves may not overclock to the same clock speeds we achieved here. Overclocking is a lottery and we cannot garauntee that board partners are not sending us cherry picked video cards that overclock exceedingly well.

Game Play Summary:

There are very few products that can get close to the performance delivered by Gainward's GeForce 7800 GTX, which performed flawlessly throughout the whole of our benchmarking suite. We are still finding it hard to believe just how much performance this GPU delivers from a single slot cooling solution and it is, thus far, the fastest video card that we have tested in our labs.

The improved core and memory clocks meant that we could attain a higher level of playable image quality in Far Cry - it was possible to attain a smooth gaming experience at 1600x1200 with HDR lighting turned on. There are some parts of Far Cry that suffer from over exposure when using HDR, but the lower HDR settings do not experience it in quite the same manner as, say, HDR '7'. We found that HDR '2' delivers the best performance and image quality compromise, while not being massively over exposed in some instances that the higher HDR settings can show.

In Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, we found that we were able to increase the Anisotropic Filtering levels, which made textures look that little bit sharper. It would have been nicer to see the improvements that we saw in Far Cry, but it seems that not every game responds to clock speed increases in quite the same way. We did find that the game was much smoother on Gainward's GeForce 7800 GTX Golden Sample than it was on a reference GeForce 7800 GTX with the added image quality, too.

We also found that we were able to make notable improvements to the image quality in NFS: Underground 2 and Half-Life 2. In both games, we were able to increase the level of Anti-Aliasing at 1600x1200 which delivered an even crisper looking scenery. Some may find that Half-Life 2 looks better at 1600x1200 4x TRSS AA than it does at 1600x1200 8xS TRMS AA, as some of the wire fences look a little unrealistic with Multi-Sampled Transparency Anti-Aliasing.

Super Sampled Transparency Anti-Aliasing really helps to catch those alpha textures that are not usually caught by a normal multi-sample pattern. Gainward's GeForce 7800 GTX Golden Sample is playable at both settings, so it is down to you to make the choice as to which looks better. In NFS: Underground, we were able to increase the image quality from 2x TRSSAA to 4x TRSSAA without a massive performance hit, allowing for a higher image quality again.

Final Thoughts...

To say that Gainward's implementation of the GeForce 7800 GTX is fast would be an understatement. There are many occasions where the Gainward Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample is so much faster than a reference clocked GeForce 7800 GTX, meaning that we were able to enhance some already fantastic playable settings further. It is often the case that manufacturers market their video cards as overclocked, but in fact the overclock means very little - you find that you cannot increase the in-game details, which kind of defeats the idea of paying a premium for a pre-overclocked video card.

However, due to the way that NVIDIA's G70 GPU has several dynamic clocks (we're not sure how many there are inside G70), increasing clock speeds to certain levels can have interesting effects on performance. It seems that Gainward have hit a sweet spot with this clock speed, as shown in our apples to apples tests and in our best-playable evaluations, too. The Golden Sample has a core speed that is 9% higher than reference clocks, while the memory is only 8% higher than reference - the performance in Far Cry shows a 12% increase in average frame rate, while the minimum frame rate increased by nearly 50%!

We've not mentioned price up until now - a card as fast as this is not cheap, as I am sure you can understand. MicroDirect are selling this card for £381.52 inc VAT which, considering the price of other 7800 GTX's, is a pretty good price. The price has dropped in the last few days from just shy of £400, and we're informed that it will stay as low as this - we hope that it does.

There is also the non-Golden Sample edition of this card available for £352.44 inc VAT - stock should be replenished in the next couple of days there. The standard card is clocked at 440/1300MHz - we don't expect it to perform quite as well as the Golden Sample, but the additional memory bandwidth should help this card to deliver a smoother gaming experience than a reference clocked 7800 GTX.

If you consider the price of XFX's Extreme Gamer Edition - clocked at 490/1300MHz, priced at over £430 - Gainward's Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample is exceedingly good value and judging by the way these cards overclock, you might get lucky and get one that can achieve those clock speeds all day, every day. You have to ask yourself whether that extra 20MHz of core speed is worth an additional £50 on the asking price.

In our opinion, the Extreme Gamer Edition is bested by Gainward's Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample on price and well worthy of bit-tech's excellence award. This card is a class act - at the moment, there is no card that can compete with the Gainward Ultra/3500PCX Golden Sample's performance at its £380 asking price. Fantastic.