Conclusion
NVIDIA has a winner on its hands in the AGP arena. The GeForce 7800GS can clearly push out high frames rates with ease despite the limitations of the AGP 3.0 specification. It could handle everything we threw at it. The GeForce 7800GS definitely has serious horsepower and easily beats anything previous AGP offering from NVIDIA.
Although cards are not anticipated to hit retailer shelves until this Sunday and online e-tailers until Monday, this should make gamers with legacy hardware very happy, as it will most likely drive down the cost of other cards. Prices for elusive cards such as the GeForce 6800 Ultra AGP card, which can fetch as much as $350 on eBay, should fall as well.
The GeForce 7800GS never the less represents a considerable investment. Is it worth upgrading your AGP system by spending several hundred dollars given that the launch of AMD's new Socket M2 platform is only a few months away? No need to fret here. AMD's upcoming M2 platform is not going to outperform the current processor/platform offerings by much, if at all. You'll have to wait for AMD's 65-nm CPU generation and Intel's Merom/Conroe processors before you will see any noticeable improvements on the processor front, and it will be a while before these devices become available. So if you have a decent processor and more than 512 MB of RAM, the GeForce 7800GS represents a safe bet that your AGP machine will have more than enough graphics horsepower for even the most demanding 3D game titles during the coming months.
