Reading the latest product releases from Nvidia and ATI, you may think that everyone now owns a PCI-Express graphics card and AGP is a long defunct interface from the past. The truth is rather different: the majority of PC owners still use AGP-based graphics cards and will continue to do so, thank you very much, as switching over to PCI-E means the expense of a new motherboard, probably a new CPU and a maybe even new memory modules.

So it's somewhat against the run of things that the latest product to come from Nvidia should be an AGP-based chip, the GeForce 7800GS. This is the company's new AGP flagship GPU, which comes with the usual warning that this will be the last AGP product. Funny that; so did the last couple of AGP launches.

In retrospect this should not come as a great surprise, as Nvidia has taken very little time in introducing its mighty G70 core to a range of graphics solutions; 7800GTX and GT desktop cards and the GeForce GO 7800 GTX notebook chip.

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Because it's natively a PCI-E GPU, Nvidia has had to make certain changes to the AGP part, most important of which is the addition of a HSI (High Speed Interconnect) chip to the PCB to allow it to speak to the AGP interface. As standard the 7800GS comes with a core clock of 375MHz and 256MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 600MHz (1.2GHz effective).

The numbers of vertex shaders and pixel pipelines are lower in the AGP part; six vertex shaders as opposed to the 7800GTX's eight, and only sixteen pixel pipelines for the 7800GS. But of more importance to gamers, the new core brings Shader Model 3.0 support to the AGP platform.

Hailing from Brea in California, EVGA has been producing some stunning, overclocked cards lately, based on the G70 core. So it comes as no surprise to find the 7800GS in their line-up, with four cards at the present time and more rumoured to follow.

The e-GeForce 7800GS CO Superclocked is another of its heavily overclocked models. The core speed of the card is 460MHz, an impressive leap of 85MHz over the standard core, while the memory speed has been tweaked 75MHz and now runs at 675MHz (1.35GHz effective).

All of which means it's the fastest AGP card to date; 6,304 in 3DMark05 at 1,024 x 768 resolution and real life game frame rates of 90fps, 62.45fps and 48fps in Doom 3, Far Cry and Half Life 2 respectively.

Even more impressive is that these speeds have been gained while keeping to the reference single-slot cooling solution and not resorting to water cooling like the company's 7800GTX Black Pearl.

This is a stunning card for those with an AGP-based system who are feeling left behind with all the advances in PCI-E graphics. With its Shader Model 3.0 support it will also enable future games to be enjoyed without having to rebuild your system.