Leadtek 7800 GT and ForceWare 78.03

Back on the 11th August, NVIDIA launched their second addition to the GeForce 7 series: the GeForce 7800 GT. We had a look at video cards from BFG Tech and XFX on the launch date and today we have Leadtek's premium GeForce 7800 GT implementation, which carries the Extreme moniker.

Clock speeds: It comes clocked at 450/1050MHz, so it is not surprising to say that Leadtek's PX7800 GT TDH MyVIVO Extreme (to give it its full name) performs exactly the same as XFX's implementation, which has the same clock speeds. Thus, there is really nothing new to consider from the performance perspective.

New driver: However, there is one new factor affecting the Leadtek 7800 GT. Since we looked at the XFX and BFG cards, there has been a new ForceWare release which claims to fix the shimmering issues we saw before, as well as other bugs. Many of you will have read our story regarding the regarding problems with NVIDIA's texture shimmering in the ForceWare 77.xx series drivers and will have also read the follow up stating that they'd fixed the issue. At that time, we didn't have the chance to fully evaluate the performance of the new driver in comparison to the results we had previously experienced with the bugged driver.

Today, we are going to look in to that. We already know how well the Leadtek GeForce 7800 GT performs in comparison to both the BFG Tech and XFX GeForce 7800 GT's with the old 77.77 drivers, because it performs exactly the same as the XFX card. So, today we are going to evaluate the performance of the Leadtek GeForce 7800 GT with the fixed 78.03 drivers and compare the performance of this driver on the 7800 GT with the performance of the 77.77 drivers that we used on launch day.

The card has the familiar reference GeForce 7800 GT cooler that we saw on both BFG Tech and XFX implementations. It is a single slot aluminium design with a copper insert to aid the cooling of the G70 core. It is quiet, but it is not quite as quiet as the reference cooler that most board partners' GeForce 7800 GTX's are shipping with. We are happy with the cooling solution - it seems to do the job of keeping the card cool without too much of a problem.

However, unlike the XFX cooling solution, Leadtek have taken the time to design a sticker for the cooler that makes the card stand out from other board partner solutions using the reference design cooler.

The back plate has dual DVI ports and a VIVO port to improve the functionality of this card a little bit. If you're in to both gaming and video editing, this might be the card for you. The inclusion of a VIVO port has meant that Leadtek have included a combination cable that connects directly to the VIVO port. It has connections for YPbPr (RGB) out, Composite in & out and S-Video in & out.

There are also the expected instruction manuals, driver CD, 6-pin PCI-Express power adapter and two DVI-to-VGA converters. Finally, the software suite is a pretty good one. There is the inclusion of all the software required to make use of the VIVO ports features along with two game titles, namely Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - both pretty good games by our reckoning, making for a very good bundle.