GeForce 7800GTX: EVGA's KO Edition

Test Setup and Performance

The EVGA 7800GTX KO is without a doubt the fastest 7800 that we've reviewed so far. As expected, our tests ran nice and fast, and our framerates were high. All of our games looked great and played smoothly, but we've come to expect this from any of NVIDIA's 7800 graphics cards.

This is the test system that we've been using:

MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 Processor
1 GB OCZ 2:2:2:6 DDR400 RAM
Seagate 7200.7 120 GB Hard Drive
OCZ 600 W PowerStream Power Supply

As we mentioned in the last review, we like to focus more on how these cards compare out of the box than with manual overclocking. This is simply because each card overclocks differently and you may not get the same results that we do when overclocking any given card. As expected, we saw that the EVGA 7800GTX KO reached the highest framerates of all the others, and we also saw the highest increase in performance from our reference card (which comes clocked at 430MHz, the same as the MSI's).

Here's how the EVGA e-GeForce 7800GTX KO compares to NVIDIA's reference card. Without AA enabled, Battlefield 2 and Half-Life 2 attained about the same percent increase from the reference card. BF2 gets 79.4 FPS as opposed to 71.1 (reference card), a 5% increase. HL2 gets 123.8 FPS as opposed to 117.2 for a 5.6% increase. Doom3 had 80.9 FPS over the reference card's 75.6, a 7% increase. These aren't really big differences and you likely wouldn't notice much difference in actual game play, but they are still worth noting.

With AA enabled, it's a different story: the gains are significantly higher. Half-Life 2 reached 87 FPS, which is a 11% increase in framerate from our reference card. Battlefield 2 reached 46.8 FPS, about a 10% increase, and Doom 3 had about a 9% increase with 43.7 FPS. This is enough that you might notice a difference in game play, and it shows how much EVGA's serious overclocking improves performance.

Manual overclocking is where the KO will, in a sense, break new ground. This is the first card that we've been able to test with its core clock set above 499MHz. We actually reached up to 515MHz initially, but dropped it back to 500MHz because of the issues that we mentioned earlier (it will give us the same performance). This high clock speed does allow quite impressive framerates and the numbers speak for themselves.

As has been the case with past 7800s that we've reviewed, there aren't any major leaps in performance between the cards. There is still somewhat of a tight grouping in framerates as you can see by the graphs. Just to summarize, in terms of performance (out of the box), we see the EVGA e-GeForce 7800GTX KO at the top, followed by the BFG 7800GTX OC, then EVGA's e-GeForce GTX (450MHz), and at the bottom is the MSI NX7800GTX (and NVIDIA reference card).