There is no denying that Nvidia currently enjoy complete dominance in every price range from the 6600 GT, to the mammoth 7800 GTX. In fact, Nvidia have bested ATI since the 6800 range physically hit the shelves, almost 18 months ago people!

Back in April 2004 when the 6800 Ultra was launched, ATI was hot on Nvidia’s heels with an excellent range of boards - the X800 Pro and the X800 XT. However, the launch for both Nvidia and ATI was not problem free. In a blatant attempt to out do each other both companies paper launched their cards, made everyone very excited and then failed to get cards to retailers for the next four months. The last battle between ATI and Nvidia essentially boiled down to user preference as both cards performed well and hit retailers at the same time. It was all about which game you cared for the most – Doom 3 (Nvidia) or Half-Life 2 (ATI).

This time around ATI have been left in the dust with no apparent answer to the 7800 GTX. To make things even worse Nvidia’s announcement of the 7800 GTX was no paper launch, cards were available worldwide in retailers within two weeks, and in huge quantities!

Rumours persist regarding ATI’s R520. Some believe the R520 is going to be a 7800 GTX beater or a 32 pipelined next generation product, while other more accurate sources believe ATI are having yield problems with the R520 core. The worst reports have stated that three core revisions have been attempted by ATI to date and yet they are still only managing a yield of 10%. If this turns out to be true, it will be a hard year for ATI. It may turn out that ATI has given up on its initial flagship design and instead will offer the R520 as a 16 pipe design with extremely high clocks, followed by a 24 pipe card codenamed R580 when ATI manage to figure out the yield problem.

Ok, let’s get on with this review! I am not going to cover the architecture or feature set of the 7800 series in this article, enough websites have covered this already. This review and all 7800 GTX reviews that follow are specifically about the manufacturer cards performance, not the 7800 GTX architecture.

If your looking for a good power supply to pair up with video cards like this one you may also be interested in our previous article where we tested four SLI Certified Power Supply's in an SLI configured test system