Game play testing gives the reviewer an opportunity to develop a feel for the graphics card under game play conditions. The beta 78.03 ForceWare driver that NVIDIA released on the Friday before this review was published was used.
During game play testing, sound is enabled while a portion of the game is played with Fraps collecting frame rate data in the background. A Sound Blaster Audigy 2 was used and in all cases, the highest quality in-game sound was enabled, which includes hardware mixing and environmental audio effects when available. All in-game graphics options were also set to their highest quality.
Game Play Results
Here are a few 1024x768 screen shots from the various levels that were tested.
Game Play Screenshots
Dungeon Siege 2
Brothers in Arms
F.E.A.R. Demo
Guild Wars
Vampire - The Masquerade Bloodlines
World of Warcraft
Click Images to Enlarge
The following thumbnails contain links to 2048x1536 with 4X AA screenshots from Half-Life 2.
Half-Life 2 Screenshots
Click Images to Enlarge
GPU Temperature
The temperature of the lead GPU was recorded using the nV Monitor component from NVIDIA's nTune.The following reading is with the system idle and the room temperature at a chilly 17° C (63° F).
One test (red line) was conducted with the room temperature at 24° C (75° F) while a second test (blue line) was run with the room temperature at 17° C (63° F).
GPU Temperature Results
CONCLUSION
Having used MSI's NX7800GTX in an SLI configuration during the course of this review has been a pleasure. Although SLI offers significant increases in performance, it also provides greater flexibility in the settings that can be used when playing your favorite games. For example, with SLI, 4X AA becomes practical at resolutions beyond 1600x1200, 8XS AA can be used at 1600x1200, and 8X and 16X SLI AA perform well at 1024x768.
However, it also takes quality software to make a product shine. With the control panel and texture filtering improvments that NVIDIA is delivering in the ForceWare drivers for the GeForce 7 Series, I am proud to give MSI's NX7800GTX SLI our Grand Slam Hardware award.
