Board analysis

As we stated at the outset, NVIDIA’s board partners are all following the same blueprints for their GeForce 7800 GTX cards. NVIDIA requires that all manufacturers follow their reference GeForce 7800 GTX specifications to the letter when producing their final retail boards. As a result, the first crop of GeForce 7800 GTX cards were fundamentally identical, with the only difference being that some board partners chose to overclock their first-generation cards from the factory, BFG and XFX being the most notable examples of this.

In the past few weeks, the first crop of second-gen cards been released. These 7800 GTX boards are built on the same reference specifications as the first-gen cards, only they ship with newer cooling units.

Top of the card

Bottom of NX7800GTX card

Based on their history, MSI will no doubt produce a second-gen 7800 GTX card of their own, most likely with copper cooling. With their T.O.P. Tech cooling solutions first introduced a few years ago, MSI was one of the first graphics card manufacturers to actively implement copper cooling solutions in their entire lineup of cards (many of which provided near silent operation), so we wouldn’t be surprised to see MSI do the same for future GeForce 7800 GTX cards.

Until then, the NX7800GTX will serve as MSI’s sole high-end offering.

The NX7800GTX doesn’t stray at all from NVIDIA’s reference specifications, providing the same stock clock speeds of 430MHz on the graphics core and 600MHz on the memory as NVIDIA’s reference board we previewed back in June. The board supports dual DVI and VIVO, just like other 7800 GTX cards, and ships with all the accessories you’d expect from a high-end card, including two DVI adapters, S-Video and power cables, and a hybrid video cable which includes input as well as component outputs for hooking the card up to an HDTV. MSI then finishes the card off with a DVD-ROM copy of Chronicles of Riddick, one of 2004’s hottest games.

Familiar cooling

Power circuitry and 6-pin power connector

MSI’s Dynamic Overclocking Technology Express

To help separate their NX7800GTX from other cards, MSI also bundles a copy of their Dynamic Overclocking Technology Express, also known as D.O.T. Express. As its name implies, D.O.T. can be used to dynamically overclock your NX7800GTX graphics card to one of six predetermined settings depending on temperature. The slowest setting, Private, overclocks your card 2%. The five other settings are Sergeant (4%), Captain (6%), Colonel (8%) General (9%) and Commander (10%).

If you don’t like the idea of dynamic clock speed adjustment, you can also manually set your NX7800GTX card to run at one of the six predetermined settings via D.O.T. as well. D.O.T. also ships with a slider for both core clock and memory clock speed adjustment if you’d rather tweak those speeds manually.

The only downside to MSI’s D.O.T. feature is its proprietary nature: it can only be used with MSI’s driver download, not with NVIDIA’s reference driver set. Most enthusiasts prefer to download and stick with NVIDIA’s reference drivers from nvidia.com or nzone.com rather than download the driver for their particular board because the drivers on NVIDIA’s sites are updated more frequently. For instance, the latest driver on nvidia.com is ForceWare release 77.77, dated August 11th, 2005. MSI’s latest driver is ForceWare 77.50 from July 6th, 2005.