Back in December of ‘04 I wrote about Andy buying a 6800. That card rocked, it was the top of the line card of the time and Andy was speeding along in all the games at, at that time, incredibly high FPS. His rig at the time was this:

• AMD Athlon XP 3200+
• XFX 6800 128MB
• Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro 2 Rev1
• 512MB Corsair TwinX XMS 3200
• nForce 2 Ultra 400 onboard sound card

After a year of having the card, however, the card magically got fried. Andy figured it was the power supply, so he bought a newer, more juicy, pumping power supply for the rig and RMA’ed the card to Newegg and they sent him another of the same card.

All PC gamers know, even ones like me, that Half-Life 2: Episode One was released on the first of June, 2006 as an expansion to the popular 2004 game Half-Life 2. I played some of the original, mind you not all of it, just some because thats all I had time for at Andy’s house. Anyways, the game rocks and for the fans that pre-ordered it, they had nice surprises and a good storyline to work with. I had already beaten the game before Andy had a chance of doing the same, but when he ran it, Dog (a robot pet in the game) apparently killed his graphics card before he could get 10 minutes in. Needless to say, having a graphics card fry on your computer for the second time and the same card nonetheless is not a very exciting experience. So here he went again, but this time he RMA’ed the card directly to XFX. This is where we we met Curtis.

Curtis is the sales rep who helped Andy out with his RMA problem. He offered Andy a new 6800, but due to two cards from the same line and same model dying in his system, the decision was made not to get the same card. In its place, Curtis offered Andy a 6800 XT, a supposibly better card, but it wasn’t better even though Curtis’s boss said it was, it was in fact, not as good as the card being replaced! This sales rep really is one of the best I’ve heard about…ever. Since Andy didn’t want another 6800 nor the 6800 XT or any other 6800, he thought he would ask if XFX would let him have a card from the GeForce 7 series, which are mostly PCI-E, save for a few. The 7800 GS attracted Andy and he was reading reviews about it. Ok, he obsessed about it, thats the truth, right Andy? Curtis stepped up Andy request though, he said that he would let Andy get the Extreme edition of the 7800 GS for $140, thats it. He didn’t turn the offer down, who would? That card is $300 on Newegg, $160 dollars less is a big difference. So he got that card, and on the 27th of June, 2006, I went over to his house to await the delivery that afternoon; Andy couldn’t have been happier when the FedEx guy finally got to the house at 2pm. As we both have learned with Windows, a reformat and fresh install is a must for a new video card, not only does it eliminate all the junk on the hard drive, but it speeds up the overall system so it can benchmark correctly. While he took the new card out of the box, this trooper took pictures of the beast! You’ll find pictures of it at the bottom of this post. Anyways, the card rocks like nothing you’ve ever seen and its the highest the 7 series goes for AGP, as I said earlier, after that its PCI-E only.

After taking plenty of pictures, we took the ones that the guys at Guru3d would like and put them in the post he had made about this whole ordeal. On to the pictures.