NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS For AGP Launched

Spinnerbait writes "Although new system sales with AGP slots are almost non-existent these days in the consumer desktop space, there is a still a fair aftermarket demand for upgrades in the retail area where AGP enabled motherboards abound. Although PCI Express is the mainstay interface for most new cards from graphics giants like NVIDIA and ATI, NVIDIA unwrapped a fairly high end card dubbed the GeForce 7800 GS, in an AGP variant. 16 pixel shaders engines and DX9 SM3.0 graphics compliant hardware in the latest GPU architecture from NVIDIA now available in AGP."

Comments

Not worth It.

[Jaruzel]

Modern graphics cards need super beefy machines under them to perform at their full potential. Therefore sequeezing the latest NIVDIA card (that will cost hundreds of pounds/dollars) into a 3-4 year old machine will only result in dissapointment, tears, and a 5-6 average fps.

-Jar.

Re:Not worth It.

[danpsmith]

Modern graphics cards need super beefy machines under them to perform at their full potential. Therefore sequeezing the latest NIVDIA card (that will cost hundreds of pounds/dollars) into a 3-4 year old machine will only result in dissapointment, tears, and a 5-6 average fps.

The best way, I find, as a casual gamer that doesn't need to pay the games at the highest possible resolution, etc. Is to just buy a 100-200 dollar video card every 2-3 years. A mediocre video card can usually play modern games just fine, and in that span you've upgraded all your other hardware to match the capability of the card. I don't need 60fps in the newest game at 1600x1400 to be happy, so this approach works fine for me.

Bullshit.

[EvilCabbage]

You're assuming only three and four year old machines have AGP slots?

For a great number of reasons my most recent PC ended up with an AGP slot, it's less than 12 months old. This kind of card may just be a worth addition.

Hell, out of a dozen or so associates I can only name one that has a PCIE graphics setup.

Nice card...but i dont think ill upgrade.

[techmedic]

This looks like a great card for someone with a AGP slot and a decent cpu to team up with the card, but if i did get this card it would be going in my game machine at the office. Just a AMD XP3000 which now has just a 5900 in it. All ive been doing is Guild Wars lately (when im working of course)and the game plays great on what ive got. This card will most likely be put into systems with slower CPU's and older motherboards and chipsets. Would be interesting to see a review that maybe showed how the card scales with a wide range of older and recent processors (didnt check any other reviews other than the HH link). Lets say from the XP2000 on up to recent chips (on the AMD side). Just som people know that they wont be wasting there money by tossing this card in there older machine.

Dual DVI support needed

[Anonymous Coward]

These high end cards seriously need dual DVI support. This 7800 comes with DVI and DSUB connectors. This is useless in my opinion for the amount of money it costs.

Re:I'd prefer a review that compared it w/ ATI x85

[evilviper]

But these days desktops are only about 50% of the market, and AMD really has nothing to compete with in the portable market.

AMD is slightly behind, only because they didn't jump to 65nm as fast as Intel. When they do (shortly) by all accounts they should jump right past Intel.

The idea that AMD doesn't have good mobile processors was from 5+ years ago, and wasn't completely true back then anyhow.

Re:I'd prefer a review that compared it w/ ATI x85

[laffer1]

I think it depends on the games you play too. Its similar to video card choice. If you buy games from a company that favors AMD or reacts quickly to whats popular, then AMD chips would be the best choice. If you play a few year old games, or from a vendor that favors intel its more logical to buy intel. Likewise, some companies optimize for ATI and others nVidia.

The other factor is what operating systems you intend to use and the motherboard chipset. Gamer rigs are often custom built and therefore gamers can pick known stable chipsets. If you walk into best buy and pick up a machine, its bound to have a cheap chipset. I prefer intel chips because I know the intel based chipsets will have working usb, agp (or pciE), etc. AMD processors are great, but the chipsets to go with them often suck.

I suspect intel will need to work on speedy chips after they get their power usage under control. Soon software will be optimzied for AMD chips and intel will have to play catch up. The more popular AMD gets, the more reliable the motherboards will become (i hope).

Just as a side note, i have a dual xeon 2.0ghz and an amd sempron 2300+ (nforce2). WIth a non SMP kernel in linux or freebsd 6 I noticed that the two systems run about the same speed. They seem very comparable. The AMD machine even has a slower bus speed. And both have different disk subsystems (xeon has a u160 scsi disk and the amd box has a sata raid 1 array). I just find it interesting that cpu bound operations are similar for an intel workstation class chip and a low end amd thats rated only 300 mhz faster. On freebsd, this is with custom kernels and userland recompiled for the chips. Generic performance is worse on the amd machine.