Gainward bring you a 512MB 7800 GT for AGP!!!!

jezsoup · 30 Apr 2006 at 00:16

Richdog said:
God knows why OCUK, a multi-million pound company, use them. Pee-poor.

Best of a bad lot?

Cheap?

Falkentyne · 30 Apr 2006 at 00:33

Your best bet may be to remove the heatsink.
Otherwise you may never know what chip is on the card you have.
Unless you want to deal with having wasted money.....I would remove the heatsink. (reapply thermal paste carefully when done).

Discoboy · 30 Apr 2006 at 00:41

Okay just had time to get my new 7800GS+ in to my sons box, ive done some benchmarking, comparing this card 7800GS+ @ stock to his original X850XTPE

ATI X850XTPE

3D Mark 03 - 14229
3D Mark 05 - 6688

7800GS+ (stock)

3D Mark 03 - 17547
3D Mark 05 - 7889

That’s a pretty good increase I reckon

18% on 3D Mark 05 and 23% on 3D Mark 03. I will overclock it and report back later…..

IdburnU · 30 Apr 2006 at 01:01

Nice increase there, and almost identical to the increase I experienced going from the X800 XT PE to the Gainward. With some conservative overclocking it has gone to a 8425 in 3DMark05:

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=1985444

Be interested to see what results you get from overclocking it, seemed to make a nice difference to me.

ashmanq · 30 Apr 2006 at 11:36

The $6m Dan said:
That is a seriously tasty mod

I agree!

Gibbo · 30 Apr 2006 at 11:40

ajgoodfellow said:
The Inquirer also says that it's a G71 product - links here and here

Yes that is pretty accurate. Only approx 1500 produced and OcUK has upto 1200 of them if we wish and 600 of those arrived on Friday, but we've already sold 250+ this is very popular card!!

tmileson · 30 Apr 2006 at 12:13

Mines being held hostage by City link over the weekend - will be at work on tuesday as well so won't be able to go colect it till wednesday

Discoboy · 30 Apr 2006 at 12:47

Okay had time to do some overclocking with the 7800GS+ card

Used Ati tool to find core and mem max settings at which point artifacts/corruption started and that was 575 for core and 780 for mem. So then set back to stable setting of core at 554 (core sweet spots are 527, 554 and 581 due to vortex clock, shader ROP multipliers) and mem at 725 (1450mhz). Then ran for an hour on load to check for artifacts again, finally ran 3D Mark 03 and 05..

ATI X850XTPE

3D Mark 03 - 14229
3D Mark 05 - 6688

7800GS+ (stock 450/1250)

3D Mark 03 - 17547
3D Mark 05 – 7889

7800GS+ (OC 554/1450)

3D Mark 03 - 20136
3D Mark 05 – 9119

That’s a pretty good increase I reckon 36% on 3D Mark 05 and 42% on 3D Mark 03.

Looks like a 7900GT core with 24 active pipes to me……..

balth_dire · 30 Apr 2006 at 13:36

I've no doubt that those who are upgrading from old quadros and x850s are seeing a healthy increase in speed,

Discoboy, you're comparing a massively overclocked 7800+ GS to an x850,

the question however, is whether you and other users would have obtained virtually the same performance boost had you chosen the standard 7800GS BLISS, I'm still utterly convinced this card is the 20 pipe model with slightly increased core and memory speeds, clock for clock, there is negligible performance variation between the two.

If you had the standard model and set it to either 450/1250 or 554/1450, I'd bet my house on it matching the card you have just purchased.

Doesn't anyone find it slightly dubious that Gainward has made no mention of the 24 pipe claim on their website??

Jack_Pepsi · 30 Apr 2006 at 13:40

Balth_Dire - Gainward have it on their homepage.

It's been there for a while I do believe.

Y'right on the lack of Core details!

balth_dire · 30 Apr 2006 at 13:42

Jack_Pepsi said:
Balth_Dire - Gainward have it on their homepage.

It's been there for a while I do believe.

Y'right on the lack of Core details!

Where does it mention 24 pipes?

I'd really rather not have to remove the heatsink and check, these rev 3 arctic coolers are a pain to get off....really adhesive ram pads. Perhaps OcUK could check one of theirs

. Then at least we'd know if we're dealing with a bios/driver issue or Gainward misrepresenting a product.

Discoboy · 30 Apr 2006 at 14:05

@balth dire,
If you run Lavalys “Everest” (Software and hardware diagnostics/benchmarking utility) and look under the GPU section it will tell the present used pixel pipelines. My 7800GS+ is showing as 24 pipes..

balth_dire · 30 Apr 2006 at 14:31

Discoboy said:
@balth dire,
If you run Lavalys “Everest” (Software and hardware diagnostics/benchmarking utility) and look under the GPU section it will tell the present used pixel pipelines. My 7800GS+ is showing as 24 pipes..

Well well, so it does

. The plot thickens then, why the lack of performance when compared to the 7800gs, it would be helpful if someone else who has access to both cards could do a quick comparison.

ajgoodfellow · 30 Apr 2006 at 14:33

What CPU are you running?

It's possible that you're CPU limited so you're not seeing the cards full potential

Discoboy · 30 Apr 2006 at 14:36

@balth dire,

With my 7800GS+ @ stock (450/1250) I am getting 3D marks of:

3D Mark 03 - 17547
3D Mark 05 – 7889

But you are only getting 6846 in 3D Mark 05.

My system spec is an Intel P4D 940 @ 3.8ghz with 2GB of Ram and a 550Watt PSU, could you be CPU limited?

FYI info I just run a bench at 600/1450 on the 7800GS+ and got:

3D Mark 03 - 21547
3D Mark 05 – 9459

Vita · 30 Apr 2006 at 14:48

nice bloody scores :eek:

Richdog · 30 Apr 2006 at 15:27

So are these 7900's not performing as they should then?

balth_dire · 30 Apr 2006 at 16:32

Discoboy said:
@balth dire,

With my 7800GS+ @ stock (450/1250) I am getting 3D marks of:

3D Mark 03 - 17547
3D Mark 05 – 7889

But you are only getting 6846 in 3D Mark 05.

My system spec is an Intel P4D 940 @ 3.8ghz with 2GB of Ram and a 550Watt PSU, could you be CPU limited?

FYI info I just run a bench at 600/1450 on the 7800GS+ and got:

3D Mark 03 - 21547
3D Mark 05 – 9459

Until somebody else can actually compare these 2 cards (BLISS 7800GS+ and BLISS 7800) side by side, those scores don't mean an aweful lot as we still haven't established whether or not you could have scored the same with the BLISS 7800GS.

I have already mentioned above that I've tested the CPU theory, I have a p4gd1 motherboard (socket 478 with pci-e) running a 3.4ghz EE gallatin (non-overclocked) with a 7800gtx and 2gb OCZ RAM, the latter scores 7412 in 3dmark 05.

By comparison My AGP system consists of an Abit IC7 Max 3, again with a 3.4ghz EE gallatin (non-overclocked) and 2gb of OCZ RAM, and even when clocked at the same speeds as the 7800gtx, the 7800gs+ is topping out at 7100, exactly the same score as the 7800gs and significantly slower than the 7800gtx, which it is supposed to be matching.

Darren555 · 30 Apr 2006 at 17:09

Discoboy said:
So then set back to stable setting of core at 554 (core sweet spots are 527, 554 and 581 due to vortex clock, shader ROP multipliers) and mem at 725 (1450mhz).

Do these sweet spots apply to the 20 pixel pipe line version as well i.e. 446, 473, 500?

Falkentyne · 30 Apr 2006 at 17:39

balth_dire said:
Well well, so it does . The plot thickens then, why the lack of performance when compared to the 7800gs, it would be helpful if someone else who has access to both cards could do a quick comparison.

Did that program show that you have 24 active pipes?

How many pipes did it say your 7800GS had? Can you check that also, or do you still have the card ?

I would definitely double check. If it says that your 7800gs had 20 pipes, then I would just try driver cleaner and reinstall drivers, make sure vsync is off, AA/AF is off, and AGP and texture acceleration in DXDIAG is on.

If everything checks out AND you still are getting the exact same scores on both cards, perhaps your card is defective and the 4 pipes are not working? That would be -very- bad news....