7800GT differs from the 7800GTX in having 20 pixel pipelines versus the 24 on the 7800GTX. EVGA decided to overclock their 7800GT CO to 470MHz, a healthy 70MHz clock over the standard 7800GT found in many models. It's also a 40MHz overclock over the 7800GTX. It'll be an interesting battle with 16 ROPs and 24 pixel pipelines versus 16 ROPs and 20 pixel pipelines. A ROP is a outputted pixel, as every clock, 16 pixels maximum are outputted. Pure pixel fillrate is becoming more and more irrelevant, as with over a 7.5 Gigapixel fillrate, the 7800GT CO should have plenty of horsepower to run games at max resolution and settings.

Memory clock on the 7800GT is 1.1GHz; a 100MHz overclock over the reference GT. eVGA outfitted their 7800GT CO with 8 32MB 2ns G-DDR3 memory chips. 2ns memory is rated for 500MHz, meaning the EVGA card is running over the rated speed by 50MHz. The eVGA 7800GT has a maximum theoretical memory bandwidth of 35.2GB/second, (1.1GHzx256-bit/8 bits per byte= 35.2GB/second). This is slightly lower than the 7800GTX, having 1.2GHz memory providing up to 38.4GB/second and much lower than the new x1800XT's memory bandwidth of 48GB/second, but the intended competition to the 7800GT is the X1800XL just coming to stores now, with a memory bandwidth of 32GB a second

G70 is built on TSMC's 0.11 micron process with over 302 million transistors. The previous generation 6800 (NV40) series was built on 0.13 micron and had 222 million transistors. NVIDIA and ATI have increased their transistor counts by doubling the number, nearly every 24 months. It's hard to imagine that it was only 2 1/2 years ago the 5800 Ultra was released with ~150 million transistors and a fillrate of about 4Gigapixels. NVIDIA cut the number of Vertex Shader pipelines on the 7800GT from 8 to 7 as compared to the 7800GTX.

One key feature of any video card released today the Pixel and Vertex Shader version it fully supports. Looking at the lineup of ATI and NVIDIA cards for the forseeable future, virtually every card sold will support Pixel Shader 3.0 and Vertex Shader 3.0 standard. Key features of PS3.0 include nearly unlimited shader lengths, and dynamic branching. Vertex Shader 3.0 includes support for Vertex Texture Fetch and Geometry instancing support. NVIDIA beefed up the shader core in G70 so that performance in the most commonly used shaders is increased. I've already covered most of the features in various other 7800GTX and GT reviews and won't repeat them here.