Nvidia 7800GS..AGP's last hurrah?
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Games released in the past 12 months have pushed my faithful ATI 9800Pro video card to it's limits. I've been wanting a new video card for the past year but majority of the recent Nvidia & ATI offerings have been PCI-E based. If I bought a PCI-E based card, I would have had to also upgrade to a new PCI-E based motherboard, new CPU (socket 939), PSU, etc. I could not justify to myself spending a lot of money for something only to be "outdated" again within another year. Nvidia's 7800GS which is an AGP based card was officially launched last week. I picked up the XFX version. The GPU is factory overclocked from 375MHz (Nvidia reference) to 440 MHz and the memory is also bumped up a bit . It's been rumored that the 7800GS GPUs didn't quite meet the specs of their big brothers and were thus salvaged / repackaged for the AGP market..makes sense..who knows.. who cares...my games look and run a lot nicer now compared to the 9800Pro. While the 7800GS is not the fastest card in the market, it's a great stop-gap until AMD's new socket AM2 + new DX10 video cards from Nvidia / ATI are released later this year.
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