XFX chose to make the design of their 7800GTX similar in appearance to the NVIDIA reference design. There is a 12-fin fan on the front area of the heatsink/cooling fan assembly covering the GPU and memory modules. One big difference between the 7800GT and 7800GTX is the length of the 7800GT is about the same as the earlier 6800GT and not the monster in size that the 7800GTX is.

XFX outfits the card with 256MB of 2.0ns DDR-3 memory. This provides a maximum clock speed of 1GHz rated. XFX clocks the memory at 1060MHz, a 60MHz overclock over the reference card. The memory bandwidth of the card is 34GB/second. By way of comparison, the standard 7800GT has a memory bandwidth of 32GB, and the 7800GTX has a memory bandwidth of 38.4GB/second

The core clock of the XFX 7800GT is set at a standard speed of 430MHz, a 30MHz overclock over the reference card. The maximum fillrate of the card with 20 pixel pipelines is 8.6Gigatexels a second, compared to a maximum of 10.32 on the 7800GTX reference and 8.0 Gigatexels a second on the reference 7800GT. There are 16 ROPs on the card, giving a maximum fill rate of 6.88 Gigapixels a second output.

The card is a PCI Express x16 card. PCI Express offers up to 250MB/second of memory bandwidth bidirectional a second per x1. The x16 slot offers up to 8GB/second total bandwidth between the card and the system. The G70 chip is a native PCI Express chip, not requiring a HSI bridge chip earlier NVIDIA PCI Express cards needed to run. XFX decided to require extra power over the 75W the PCI Express x16 slot provides. There is a 6-pin PCI Express power connector on the card to provide that extra power.

Every 6800 and 7800 card I’ve reviewed has 2 DVI-I connectors for dual monitor support. The 7800GT is no exception to this, allowing for connection to two LCD monitors with DVI connections, two CRTs with the included adapters, or a LCD and a CRT monitor. NVIDIA’s drivers have an application called nView allowing for easy control over the video features of the card.