Buy GeForce 7800GTX 512MB now!

OUR LONG-TIME READER Byron reported to us that an e-tailer has a Monday launching product on sale now. Under SKU number: 3000415, you will find an XFX GeForce 7800GTX 512MB in retail package, selling for a mere $799.

For that amount of money, I can book a one-week holiday in Hawaii and I live in Croatia, which means Hawaii are literally, on the other side of the globe, or buy an Xbox 360 Pro Gamer bundle with Xbox 360, hard drive upgrade, two wireless gamepads and 10 launch games.

Still, this baby is the new king of 3D world, so for $799 you get the following: "7800Ultra" is clocked at 550MHz for the GPU core and 900MHz DDR for the video memory (as written on a retail box). Result is fill-rate of gigantic 8.8 billion pixels per second (up from 6.88 on original 7800GTX) and 13.2 billion texels per second (up from 10.3 Gtexel), bundled with 57.6 GB/s of video bandwidth goodness.

Just to compare, GeForce 256 was launched six years ago and it featured a shocking fill-rate of 0.46 Gpixels/second. So, the sheer processing power of a 3D GPU increased 19 times.

There is just one problem, though: for $60-80 more, you can find two 7800GTX 256MBs, and in SLI will eat this single board alive, regardless of the clock or bandwidth.

We also got the info from a reader who has already bought the 512MB board in store, and he reports that World of WarCraft, F.E.A.R., Far Cry 64-bit version and now work in 1900x1200 with 4xTAA in SuperSampling mode and 16xAF, something his 7800GTX 256MB could not handle.

Sadly, we're not on Nvidia's press samples list, so we cannot check for ourselves. For now. µ

L'INQ
E-tailer's site