Conclusion

NVIDIA’s GeForce 7800 GTX is an incredibly powerful graphics card. Sporting an increased number of pixel and vertex pipelines, higher clocks, and the enhancements NVIDIA has made to its G70 core, the 7800 GTX is a more than capable performer, delivering performance 1.5-2X times greater than its predecessor, the GeForce 6800 Ultra in some cases.

If you’re not careful however and pair the 7800 GTX with a slower processor, all that power can go to waste. This is because the processor isn’t fast enough to keep up with the graphics card. An analogy we’ve used in the past is putting 14” tires on a Ferrari.

Just as a 14” tire wouldn’t be capable of providing the traction needed for the Ferrari to accelerate, a slower processor prevents the 7800 GTX from hitting higher frame rates. Fortunately, AMD’s Athlon 64 processors are fast enough to keep the 7800 GTX sufficiently fed, although we obviously saw that the Athlon 64 3000+ was preventing the 7800 GTX from reaching its full potential in many cases.



Based on our testing, the sweet spot kicks in somewhere around the A64 3500+ range. Our numbers with Half-Life 2 show this most dramatically. In addition, the HL2 1024x768 results also show that the 7800 GTX benefits from the 1MB L2 cache of the 4000+ and FX processors. The scaling results on page three corroborate these findings as well, as the 7800 GTX’s performance jumps profoundly at 2.2GHz. This is probably the clock speed you should shoot for if you’re in the market for a new processor but don’t want to drain your bank account in the process; or if you can’t afford a new chip, it’s definitely the speed you should go for when overclocking.

If you’re lucky enough to afford a GeForce 7800 GTX SLI setup, you should definitely set your goals higher. In our GeForce 7800 GTX Performance Preview article, we were CPU-bound in many cases with the 7800 GTX SLI configuration even when running with an FX-55 CPU, which was the fastest processor we had at the time. We wouldn’t be surprised if 3.0GHz or more was required to truly keep a 7800 GTX SLI config running optimally.