- GIGABYTE 7800GT card
- PowerDVD 5.0
- Xpand Rally
- Spell Force
- HDTV /VIVO cable
- 2 DVI-I to D-Sub adapters
- Power Connector
The first 3D accelerator I bought was a Voodoo card from Diamond Multimedia (Monster3D 4MB) back in 1997. The Diamond Monster3D came with 20 games and game demos. I kind of miss the days when video card manufacturers included many modern games using the latest features of the card they come with. GIGABYTE chose to include Xpand Rally and Spell Force, which are two ok games.
Hardware-wise the 7800GT comes with a VIVO/HDTV cable to attach a HDTV and other inputs, a DVI-I to D-Sub adapter to allow dual monitors (I wish GIGABYTE had included two), the PCI Express power connector, and the driver CD. The PCI Express slot provides up to 75W of power to a video card. The 7800GT needs more power thus the power connector needs to be attached for normal operation.
Setup of the card was easy and pain-free. After taking out the drivers from the previous video card on my system, I shut down the computer and removed the old 6800GT. After setting the SLI card to Normal mode on my ABIT NI-8 SLI motherboard, I turned on the computer and installed a fresh install of Windows XP with SP2. NVIDIA recently released Beta 80xx series drivers on their nZone website and I installed the 81.84 drivers.
NVIDIA has some new improvements with the Forceware 81.84 drivers. This is their first 80 series driver released, with previous drivers based upon the 75 series. Key features of the new driver include support for SLI with differing cards and differing clock speeds, performance improvements and support for NVIDIA's next generation video card. If you haven't downloaded the drivers yet, I would suggest it ASAP.
