nVidia wasn’t kidding when they said that their 7800GTX card will be available from most of the leading manufacturers at launch. We’ve already received samples from Gigabyte, MSI, Leadtek and Albatron, however, the Albatron card had to be returned before we could evaluate it so we didn’t get a chance to test that one out. The remaining three cards are IDENTICAL to the reference card that nVidia sent us- take a look at this picure of the back of the card and tell us if you can tell if that's a reference card or one by MSI, Gigabyte or Leadtek.

Basically, what his means is that any 7800GTX card that you buy from the above mentioned vendors (and probably quite a few more) AT THIS TIME will look and operate identically. In fact, we had absolutely no problem connecting any of these cards with any another in SLI mode. About the only difference we have for the moment is in the packaging and the front sticker of the heatsink. Lets take a look at that in each of these three cards.

The Gigabyte card above came in a nice big box about the size of a motherboard box. On the software side, Gigabyte bundled Joint Operations and Xpand Rally along with Power Director 3 and the drivers CD. A Power cable was also included and so was a breakout VIVO box.

Next, we have the MSI card which came in a shiny silver box with only one game- Chronicles of Rddick: Escape from Butcher's Bay. A VIVO cable along with the power cable was also included. MSI put a white sticker on the front of their card making it look just a tad bit different than other cards.

Finally, the Leadtek card came is a yellow box which we thought looked good and should manage to attract the attention of a buyer. Inside, you find the VIVO cable along with the power cable. On the software side, we like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within while Cool3D and VideoStudio8 make up the rest of the bundle. All of these cards came with two DVI-VGA adapters.