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Of course the 7800 GTX 512 is fully SLi compatible, so if you have an insatiable greed for frame rates and image quality features, and more money than the Sultan of Brunei, you could have two of these babies ticking over inside your case. Just remember to factor in a decent power supply into your costing – nVidia recommends a 500W PSU for an SLi setup, while a single card PC will need a minimum of 350W power supply.

But if you’re reading this review, what you really want to know is how it performs. Put simply the 7800 GTX 512 is lightning fast! Of course I pitched it against the best that the competition had to offer, a Radeon X1800 XT 512MB running the latest 5.11 Catalyst drivers. I loaded up the latest ForceWare nVidia drivers for the 7800 GTX 512 – version 81.89.

Traditionally ATI has pulled ahead of nVidia when it comes to 3DMark tests, but not this time. The 7800 GTX 512 managed to stay ahead of the ATI card in both 3DMark05 and 03, across all resolutions and image quality settings.

The Far Cry and Half-Life 2 results were pretty close, with very little to separate the two cards. Doom 3 has always been a favourite for nVidia cards, due to their superior OpenGL performance, but ATI promised that the 5.11 drivers would show a significant gain here. There’s no doubt that the Doom 3 scores for the X1800 XT were better than I would have previously expected, but the 7800 GTX 512 was still significantly faster, especially at the higher resolutions.

What really surprised me though were the Day of Defeat results with HDR enabled. Here the 7800 GTX 512 left the X1800 XT for dead once I started pushing the resolution up. Running at 2,048 x 1,536 with HDR but no FSAA or AF, the 7800 GTX 512 managed a very playable 74fps compared with 49fps on the X1800 XT. In fact, even when I turned on 4x FSAA and 8x AF, the nVidia card turned in a score better than the ATI board with no image quality switched on.

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