Well, it's that time of year again when the big two in the graphics card market start squaring up to each other. Or at least it should be, but with the launch of the GeForce 7800GTX, Nvidia has stolen a march on ATI whose own new high-end card, based on the R520, hasn't been launched yet. So while ATI continues to add finishing touches to the technology, Nvidia is fast vanishing over the horizon.

At the heart of the new card is the 110nm G70 core which has an astonishing 302 million transistors, nearly twice as many as its nearest ATI rival, the X850XT Platinum Edition (160 million). Or, to show just how hefty a processor it is, a Prescott Pentium 4 has a mere 125 million.

All that aside, the G70 isn't that much different from the previous NV40 found in the 6800, which already had ShaderModel 3.0 support. The biggest difference is to be found in the pixel pipeline layout, where the G70 now has 24 pipelines as opposed to the NV40's 16. Also up is the number of vertex shader units; the G70 has an extra two for a total of eight.

The cooling solution is a single slot one, although the reference cooler covers pretty much the whole of the top of the card, with the rear modules and the PCB under the GPU cooled by black-coloured heatsinks.

The core speed of the G70 has risen just 30MHz from the NV40's speed to run at 430MHz, while the 256MB of GDDR3 memory is clocked at 600MHz (1,200MHz effective) and runs a 256-bit bus for a peak memory bandwidth rate of 38.4GB/s.

If you see the Golden Sample label on a Gainward box you know the contents are going to be something special and the Ultra 3500PCX doesn't disappoint. From the outside it looks like a reference design, albeit with a red coloured cooler, while the rear of the card has the standard heatsinks. This is because for the moment all 7800GTX's will be based on the reference design - coloured PCBs and custom cooling solutions will follow later - so it's what's under the heatsink that counts.

Gainward's Golden Sample card comes with a core clock of 470MHz - that's 40MHz higher than the reference design - while the memory clock has risen a whopping 100MHz to 1,300MHz. Remember that this is on standard cooling, which gives you some idea of what the speed potential is for the G70.

The higher clock speeds make Gainward's card one of the fastest you can buy straight out of the box. An average 3DM05 score for a 7800GTX is around 7,400 at 1,024 x 768 resolution, but we got 7,900 out of the Golden Sample we tested (ATI's X850XT PE gives around 6,500), while the frame rate for Doom 3 rose from 107fps to 120fps.

To keep the price to a reasonable level the bundle supplied with the card is pretty basic. There's a 6-pin PCI-Express power adapter, two DVI-to-VGA adapters and, as the card has a VIVO port, there are several output options; RGB in, S-Video in and out, and Component In/Out connections along with Component extension cable too.

Gainward's Golden Sample 7800GTX shows the potential of Nvidia's latest flagship graphics card, with eye-watering performance even with the reference design PCB and cooler. It bodes well for the specially cooled cards that are sure to appear soon.