The NX7800GTX is based on the GeForce 7800 GTX reference design. Although two review samples were missing the artwork that add-on manufacturers normally apply to the fan housing this link contains a photograph of a retail model.
MSI NX7800GTX
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The peak power consumption of the GeForce 7800 GTX ranges from 100 to 110 watts when all 302 million transistors on the GPU are powered. The GeForce 6800 Ultra also had a peak power consumption of 100 to 100 watts, but contained 80 million fewer transistors than the GeForce 7800 GTX.
The transition to PCI-Express is gaining momentum thanks to hot technologies like SLI. A key benefit of PCI-Express is that it allows simultaneous bi-directional communication between the GPU (graphics memory) and CPU (system memory) as depicted in the diagram below. The following video clip provides a demonstration.
AGP vs. PCI-Express
The following three slides list many key features of the GeForce 7800 GTX, which has a second-generation Shader Model 3.0 capable graphics engine.
GeForce 7800 GTX Specifications - Slide 1
Games like Splinter Cell Chaos 3 use Shader Model 3.0 to create special graphics effects such as high dynamic range (HDR) rendering, parallax mapping, soft shadows, and tone mapping.
Developers can take advantage of the 128-bit floating point precision in the GeForce 7800 GTX's pipeline to eliminate banding artifacts, which is illustrated in the following comparison.
Banding Artifacts Comparison
A couple of updates were made to the SLI Technology section in the next slide. The first update is that NVIDIA recently unveiled two new SLI antialiasing modes, which are covered near the end of the review. The second update is that there are now over 100 games that are SLI optimized.
GeForce 7800 GTX Specifications - Slide 2
NVIDIA's PureVideo technology is a hardware and software based solution that is designed to provide high-quality digital capture and playback capabilities. PureVideo is showing up in other consumer electronic devices that are capable of playing digital media such as mobile phones, PDAs and gaming consoles.
