You know, prior to writing this article I was looking back at the GeForce 6800 Ultra release. It was exactly fourteen months ago since the release of the GeForce Series 6. Normally we see a 6 month long product cycle, meaning every six months there's a new architectural or refresh product release. Come to think of it, I don't think that NVIDIA has ever seen so much positive commenting ever on a product range. Looking back at the GeForce 6200, 6600 and the 6800 I can only see their tremendous success. The architecture was mostly right and from a gaming point of view the complete series was simply brilliant.

Fact is, the Series 6 product still is a huge success and it will remain that way a bit longer. Look at the technology sector where a PC pretty much has zero value after a year. With that in mind, how often is a 14 month old product still being a success? I still recommend buying a 6600 GT or 6800 card to a lot of people. It offers massive performance and a 100% up-to-date feature set. But NVIDIA has to move forward don't they? For the first time in years NVIDIA actually had more time to develop a new card as the Series 6 is such a long-lasting success.

People, may I introduce to your Series 7 then? Yes? Good :)

So today's product my friends is of course the widely gossiped about GeForce 7800 GTX. Last week information leaked everywhere. Even pre-orders appeared from e-tailers like mwave.com, who decided to spill the beans by posting complete technical specifications including PDF files (eVGA). Let me throw some features straight away at you as this time rumors were way less then normal, yet quite accurate. Yes, 24 pixel pipelines, yes 8 Vertex processors and yes a 430 MHz core frequency and 1200 MHz memory frequency running on 256 MB of GDDR3 memory. With these specs out of the way, let's startup this article.

Be prepared for a rather long article as we seriously have lot's stuff to show you. We actually received a card nine days before the launch date, which quite honestly is a massive luxury compared to previous NVIDIA reference reviews we wrote.

The article will cover the magic, science and figures that the 7800 GTX offers technologically and feature wise. We'll look at the new features, photo's, technology demo's, in-game screenshots, power consumption, HDTV output and decoding performance, overclocking and of course we'll run an uberload of benchmarks to satisfy your need for your performance context. We have to tease to please right?

Ladies and gentlemen, let me show you everything you wanted to know about the GeForce 7800 GTX.