When nVidia introduced their 7800GTX video card it took the market by surprise, offering a significant increase in performance over its predecessor. While the number crunching ability was very impressive, it came at a steep price; and let’s be honest only a handful of people have the means to buy a $500 video card. The most popular computer products are those that offer a great price/performance balance, the reason why the Geforce 4 Ti4200, Geforce FX5900XT and Geforce 6800GT are/were more widely used than their high end counterparts.

Lucky for us nVidia is continuing their tradition as they launched the 7800GT video card, 20 pixel pipelines and 7 vertex units versus 24 and 8 on the GTX, a slightly slower clocked core and memory and we have ourselves a slower, but also more budget friendly video card.

Club3D is known for seeking out those video card GPU’s which offer good performance and they offer them at affordable prices to the public. No surprise then that we find a 7800GT based product in their line-up.




Specifications

Here are the official Club3D specs:



You get Dual DVI, Video-Out and Video-In, so you’re set for a multi monitor setup from the get go.

In the box

7800 GT VGA card

Club 3D case badge

2* DVI to VGA converter

Driver and manual CD

Powerpack Installation CD (extra software)

Colin McRae 2005 DVD

breakout box (huge cable with all the Vivo connectors)

Two Molex to PCI-e power adaptor

The breakout box is really convenient for hooking up a TV/Projector/HDTV or to get image from a gaming console (PS2) or video camera onto your PC.




The Club3D 7800GT Video Card

Club3D is following the nVidia reference design; the cooling solution is 1-slot and as you can see features a nice Club3D logo.


(Click for Zoom)

The backside is less interesting visually of course, but for those looking to squeeze every ounce of performance out of this card, you might consider upping the voltage on the core and memory: VR-Zone shows you how.


(Click for Zoom)


7800GTX vs 7800GT

The 7800GT features less extreme cooling





And the PCB is also slightly shorter which helps when installing this card on certain motherboards:


7800GTX: a tight fit on our test motherboard

Let’s get the Club3D card installed ->

Test setup

Contrary to most, we’re doing our tests on a budget friendly Intel system; while it doesn’t compete with a decent Athlon 64 system, it can still hold its own, and it’ll be interesting to see if you can game comfortably when we add the 7800GT to this system.

Piotke's Test Setup
CPU	Intel Celeron 330 J - 2.6 @ 3.2 GHz
Cooling	Stock Intel Cooling
Mainboard	Asrock 775 Dual 880 Pro
VGA	Club3D 7800GT 256Mb Aopen Aolus 7800GTX 256Mb
Memory	2*512 Mb A-Data Vitesta DDR600
PSU	Antec TrueControl 550 Watt

Windows XP + Service pack 2

Direct X 9.0c

Forceware 81.95

Latest chipset drivers


Test Method

We have done manual run-throughs with 4 games with the 7800GT and GTX, setting the graphical quality so it offers fluent game play without sacrificing on image quality. The games we used for testing were:

Colin McRae 2005

Far Cry

Call of Duty

Painkiller

All details were set to maximum in-game, and we altered FSAA and AF settings to find out the sweet spot of this setup ->

Overclocking

Running in 2D mode the cards' clock speeds are 275 MHz for the core and 1000 MHz for the memory. When switching to 3D mode, the core speeds raises itself to 400 MHz.

The latest version of Rivatuner allows you to change clock speeds of each mode.



Rivatuner also enables nVidia’s own coolbits, which is an overclocking tool accessible through the properties panel of the video card. It allows you to either set clock speeds manually or let the system find the best settings for you. Coolbits came up with this result:


ignore the Dutch context text please :-)

That’s an increase of ~15% on the core and 12 % on the memory. After looping 3DMark05 several times these settings seemed stable and gave no visual errors. But during gaming sessions in Far Cry got saw some visual glitches, so we lowered the clock speed of both CPU and Memory which solved this, and 450/1100Mhz gave excellent performance and stability! At these speeds the GPU is running faster than a 7800GTX.


7800GTX GPU: 430Mhz / Memory: 1200Mhz

To find out if the overclocked Club3D 7800GT is a match for the 7800GTX we will compare them head 2 head.

During testing the card never reached cricitual temperatures so the stock cooling is more than sufficient to allow overclocking safely. At default speeds the core registered 51°C, while overclocked it rose to only 53°C !


Video-In

After we sorted out an issue with the WDM driver, which refused to install on one of our Windows installations, we got the Video-In working. The picture quality is quite good for an integrated module and it gives the 7800GT from Club3D an extra boost in value as this VIVO function will come in handy. Before you can say “elchupenibre” we were playing the latest PS2 game “Pro Evolution Soccer 5” on our PC, through Video-In.


This screen capture does not really do justice to the actual image quality


It’s time to see how this card performs in our game benchmarks, so on we go ->

Colin McRae 2005

We start of with a good looking racing game from Codemasters, it comes with the Club3D 7800GT card and is quite entertaining to play.



We could max out the FSAA/AF settings and still get very playable frame rates at 1280x1024:



The Club3D 7800GT stands its ground when overclocked:




FarCry

While Far Cry has been released for some time now, it can still stress the latest hardware when everything is set to maximum detail which makes the game just looks gorgeous.



Maximum FSAA/AF settings were not possible here, and we had to lower AF from 8x to 4x when increasing the resolution:



Only slightly slower than the beefier 7800GTX:

Painkiller

Painkiller is a fast and thrilling first person shooter, with a multiplayer feel similar to the original Quake 1! So fast paced action requires smooth graphics



With everything set to max single player will be enjoyable at 1280x1024, however when going for a multiplayer bout it’ll be best to either lower the resolution or decrease the FSAA setting as the frame rate takes plunges towards the 30FPS limit.



Overclocking pays off, as the 7800GT is on par with the GTX and both deliver smooth frame rates at 1280x1024:




Call of Duty

The latest Call of Duty 2 makes use of DX9 which has been covered well enough by our previous game benchmarks, so how about OpenGL? The original Call of Duty uses a modified Quake 3 engine, and when every detail is set to its maximum it’s still a beautiful game to behold, but can it stress our system enough?



You’ll notice that the maximum frame rate is capped at 60FPS, as we mistakenly forgot to disable vsync for OpenGL games; the 7800GT was already shipped back to Club3D when we stumbled upon this fact. Nevertheless it’s the minimum FPS which is of most interest as you’ll notice a drop in FPS and almost never a spike. With that said, here are the results, which are actually suprising, even at 1024x768 the frame rate goes toward the 30FPS mark. The Quake 3 engine taxes the system as much as the video card, and here we see the Celeron causing a noticeable bottleneck:



Overclocking the 7800GT brings it on par with the GTX again, and pulls the minimum FPS to a higher level.




With all the gaming tests done it is time for a conclusion ->

Conclusion

As we come to the end of our evaluation it’s simple a matter of putting things together, excellent performance and features against higher than average price when compared to mid-range video cards.

If you want the best, but don’t have the funds, the Club3D 7800GT will bring you closest to that goal. When overclocked it’s on par with the faster and more expensive 7800GTX 256Mb.

The complete package offered by Club3D is one of the better out there, with a wide range of extra software and expanded connectivity with the VIVO break-out box. Currently there is no alternative product in the price class of the 7800GT which delivers this kind of performance. And if you want to give your system a bit more oomph in a few months a 2nd card can be added to boost the performance through SLI (if you motherboard supports it).

PRO
Excellent performance
Lots of goodies in the box
VIVO break-out box
Overclocks well to offer performance on par with GTX (256Mb)
SLI enabled
Price

CON
Price

Price will be the deciding factor for most, this card can be found in Europe for a reasonable €350-400 while the GTX (256Mb) version comes in around €500.

If you have the funds, then this card comes sincerely recommended!



Questions/Comments: forum thread