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EVGA e-GeForce 7600 GS 256MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Monday, 27 March 2006 |
Just saw on Gamepyre a review on the EVGA e-GeForce 7600 GS 256MB PCIe graphics card. High-end video cards have gone up astronomically in price in the last few years. Last year the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB was released with a MSRP of $649 for a card. Even at that price, however, the card was hard to come by and selling for over $750 when it was available. This was due to the card being in higher demand than NVIDIA anticipated and the price gouging by the online e-tailers. The average gamer, however, doesn't want to spend $500 or more for a video card. The vast majority of video cards sold on the market today are in the under $200 range.
 EVGA e-GeForce 7600 GS 256MB PCI-E Review
NVIDIA and ATI sell the high-end cards at a premium so they can afford to trickle down the technology to the performance mainstream and value markets. The performance also trickles down, so the high-end of last year is about where the performance mainstream of this year will be performance-wise. The first thing I thought upon gazing the EVGA e-GeForce 7600 GS for the first time was gee where's the cooling fan? NVIDIA decided the GeForce 7600 GS could be cooled effectively by a passive heatsink. EVGA followed the NVIDIA reference design to the letter, with the heatsink covering core and memory.
The GeForce 7600 GS has 178 million transistors. NVIDIA's 90 nanometer parts use less power, run faster speeds and require less cooling than the cards they replace. The GeForce 7600 GS has 12 pixel shader pipelines and 5 vertex shader pipelines. This most closely follows the GeForce 6800 GS series from last year. With a core speed of 400MHz and memory speed of 800MHz on a 128-bit bus, the EVGA e-GeForce 7600 GS has a maximum fill rate of 4.8 Gigapixels a second and a memory bandwidth of 12.8 GB/second. It will go up against the Radeon X1600 XT which is priced similarly but has a higher clock speed.
For about $149 retail, the GeForce 7600 GS is a good card in many respects. Performance of the GeForce 7600 GS is most comparative to the Radeon X1600 PRO on the ATI side of things. Pricing wise, the GeForce 7600 GS is most like the Radeon X1600 XT at the moment. The Radeon X1600 XT is faster in games like F.E.A.R. The GeForce 7600 GS however is a good competitor to the Radeon X1600 XT, and it'll be an interesting battle between the two to see which is better. And EVGA is certainly one of the better NVIDIA manufacturers. Their cards have a lifetime warranty, but this card has a 1+1 warranty.
One thing that makes EVGA cards unique is the Step-Up program and the ability to get full value from the video card within 90 days of the purchase. Two of these cards will perform almost as well as a GeForce 7900 GT. If you want to spend $300 on a video card, it probably is better to choose a single GeForce 7900 GT to two GeForce 7600 GS's.
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