EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX EGS
As we mentioned on the previous page, because this card has ViVo capabilities, EVGA includes a few multimedia related and video authoring / editing applications with the e-GeForce 7800 GTX. We experimented with the bundled applications briefly and have some opinions and screenshots for you below...
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Snapstream Beyond Media, EVGA's Installation Menu, and CyberLink PowerDirector
All of the applications included with the e-GeForce 7800 GTX reside on the two CDs bundled with the card. Upon insertion of EVGA's driver / utility CD, users are greeted by a very clean interface where one can choose to install a variety of software, including the drivers, Acrobat Reader (for viewing the manual), ResChanger XP 2005, DirectX 9, SnapStream Beyond Media, and Ulead DVD Movie Factory 3. The driver installation uses EVGA's ADM (Automated Driver Management) tool to check the system for older software before completing the installation, but the rest of the installations are fairly standard. We particularly liked SnapStream's Beyond Media (21 day trial), and think many users will find its simple, clean interface easy to use for viewing an image library, watching videos, or playing music. Cyberlink's PowerDirector is another easy to use application for video editing / authoring, that we think is a nice addition to the e-GeForce 7800 GTX's bundle as well. Some other vendors also include PowerDirector with their ViVo capable cards, so we've worked with the application in the past and found it to be very useful for those just beginning to get involved in digital video on the PC.
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If you go back and take a look at NVIDIA's reference GeForce 7800 GTX in our launch article, you'll see an abundance of physical similarities between it and EVGA's card. In fact, the only things that physically set this card apart from NVIDIA's reference design are the custom EVGA decal on the fan shroud, and the serial number sticker on the backside of the card. Other than those two differentiating factors, the cards are essentially identical. But under the surface, there is another way in which the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX deviates from NVIDIA's reference design.
The EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX we have here, model number 256-P2-N528-AX, is equipped with 256MB of GDDR3 RAM, clocked at 1.2GHz (1.23GHz to be exact), and its G70 core is clocked at 450MHz - 20MHz higher than NVIDIA's original reference specification. The 20MHz bump in core clock speed should give the EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX an edge in compute and fillrate limited situations over NVIDIA's reference card, but the difference won't be dramatic. Should you be in the market for one of EVGA's GTX cards, pay attention to the model numbers. The 256-P2-N528-AX and 256-P2-N538-AX BF2 Edition have 450MHz core clock speeds, but the 256-P2-N525-AX (only available on EVGA's website) has its core clocked at 430MHz.
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EVGA 7800 GTX with ACS3 Cooling: Coming Soon?
We've also got a couple of teaser-shots of EVGA's future 7800 GTX that features their custom ACS3 cooling solution. Unfortunately, EVGA hasn't given us any specs for this custom model, so for now we'll just let you know that it exists and should be available sometime in the future.
For more information about the underlying technology powering the e-GeForce 7800 GTX, including a look at the drivers and an in-depth image quality analysis, please reference our launch article mentioned earlier (see here). In that article, we explain what makes the G70 tick, and detail the GeForce 7800 GTX's main features, power requirements, performance, and thermal characteristics in both a single card configuration, and in a dual-card SLI configuration.
