Leadtek 7800 GT and ForceWare 78.03

Overclocking:

When we reviewed the BFG Tech and XFX GeForce 7800 GT's, we had a problem with the drivers that we used, whereby we could not overclock the video cards as they were failing the internal artefact tester after increasing either the core or memory clock speeds by a single MHz. They were failing at default settings too, however.

With the new ForceWare 78.03 driver, the issue is now fixed, so we can overclock the Leadtek PX7800 GT TDH Extreme without a problem. We found that the card still had quite a lot of headroom left in it too. We achieved stable clock speeds of 504/1155MHz - an increase of 54MHz on the core and 105MHz (effective) on the memory. With an improved cooling solution, we expect this card to go even further still.

Drivers & Game Play Experience with the new ForceWare:

The ForceWare 78.03 drivers are generally pretty good - there is very little performance deficit as a result of the shimmering fix. In fact, we only saw a relatively big performance deficit in Battlefield 2. This lead to a reduction in playable image quality, as we had to reduce the Transparency Anti-Aliasing setting from SuperSampled to MultiSampled. The minimum frame rate was the cause of this.

We found that the frame rate during our manual play test dropped to below 25 frames per second on occasions when there was a heavy firefight or large explosions taking place. The minimum frame bottomed out at 22 frames per second, which in our opinion was not smooth enough to fully enjoy the gaming experience delivered.

In Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, NFS: Underground 2 and Half-Life 2, we saw minor performance differences. In saying that though, they were literally minor performance differences - we did not see a large enough change in performance that would affect the best playable settings that we recommended for the BFG Tech and XFX 7800 GT's back in August.

In Far Cry, we were pleased to see that the HDR bug on a single 7800 GT was fixed - we didn't experience the problem that we had when we reviewed the BFG Tech and XFX 7800 GT's anymore. The performance at 1600x1200 2xAA 8xAF did drop slightly, however. The ever-important minimum frame rate dropped to 27 frames per second from 30 frames per second. It is worth noting that we did see a slight improvement in average frame rate at these settings though.

Also, we saw a decent performance improvement in F.E.A.R. and the game was notably smoother when using the ForceWare 78.03 drivers. It was not quite smooth enough to increase the details further, though.

Thoughts on the Leadtek board:

This Leadtek GeForce 7800 GT Extreme implementation is a solid one, and it is quite suited to the Extreme moniker that Leadtek have labelled it as. The performance is really exactly what we would expect to see from a reference GeForce 7800 GTX clocked at the reference 430/1200MHz clock frequencies.

The card is a brand new product, so there isn't anywhere selling it right now. However, after speaking to Leadtek, we believe that the price will be around £310 including VAT when it does make it to the shelves over the next couple of weeks.

In all honesty, we feel that the card is a little overpriced if you consider the price of the XFX 7800 GT Extreme Edition that we reviewed and gave bit-tech's Excellence Award in August has the same clock speeds and features. XFX's 7800 GT is priced at a little over £270 on Overclockers, which is around £40 cheaper than the Leadtek Extreme Edition will be and £10 cheaper than Leadtek's standard version.

In saying that, the card is not flawed in any way and is a good, solid implementation of NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GT SKU with the added bonus of a good bundle. We just feel that the price lets it down a little. If the card had a more competitive price, we'd not hesitate in recommending this card for consideration.