I'm of several minds at the moment with the 7800GTX cards out on the market in general. If you have a 6800 Ultra in SLI the 7800GTX may be a small upgrade in that you only need one video card instead of two and need less power than that required by two cards. For now, the 7800GTX is the most feature-rich, highest performing video card on the market. The new Transparency AA really sets the GEFORCE 7800GTX apart from the competition. With it enabled, the games look better, play with few slowdowns (even with supersampling enabled), which isn't available from any other video card on the market. Once the drivers mature for the 7800GTX, and the problems with certain games get fixed things will be even better and TSSAA is something that has to be experienced to truly be appreciated. To really enjoy the benefits of the new 7800 cards you need a monitor that can accommodate screen resolutions of up to 1600x1200, which means CRT or a really expensive LCD.
One thing about video cards is the increasing prices you have to shell out for the high end cards. It wasn't that long ago those video cards were only $399 for the high-end cards (9700 Pro) and only a year or two before that when high-end video cards were $299 or less. Cards like the 7800GTX are huge complex beasts with hundreds of millions of transistors and performance nearly rivaling two of last year's video cards. With that comes a hefty fee, as 7800 cards are topping off in the $600.00 and plus range, which is just downright pricy and actually more than a months rent for me. Is it worth it?
Only those of us lucky enough to have popular sites that warrant cool samples or the rich are going to be able to procure one of these cards. Great performance, excellent features and ritzy prices are what this entire line of cards is about at the moment. Of course, the competition, namely ATI, is nearing release of their next generation video card the R520 series. The next generation ATI card is a couple of months down the road, but I never suggest waiting for the "next best thing. Currently, this is the top dog in this area of the PC and Gigabyte's offering is really so close to the reference design that it is hard to give kudos in the design area, but it had no problems to mention mechanically or performance wise giving me a warm and fuzzy, but no real yippee. My final analysis of the GV-NX78X256V-B is this; you are basically buying a reference card with a few games in a cool box with stickers (that came off BTW) spelling Gigabyte. Absolutely nothing wrong, just nothing making the card itself stand-out from others in the herd of 7800GTX cards other than the gaming bundle. Gigabyte's name and reputation are the key selling points of this package.
