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ASUS Extreme N7600 GT 256MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 04 April 2006 |
Reg Hardware has published a review on the ASUS Extreme N7600 GT 256MB PCIe graphics card. When NVIDIA launched the GeForce 7800 GTX in June 2005 it broke with tradition by not releasing a mid-range GeForce 7600 and a budget GeForce 7200, which is what we'd expected. Instead, NVIDIA demoted the GeForce 6800 chip to the upper mid-range, leaving the GeForce 6600 in the mid-range and the GeForce 6200 as a budget product... This was an unusual move but it made sense: the GeForce 6 series supports DirectX 9.0c while the ATI products of the time were DirectX 9.0b part and, let's face it, the Radeon X300 and Radeon X700 weren't very impressive.
 ASUS Extreme N7600 GT 256MB PCI-E Review
The situation changed with the release of Radeon X1300, X1600 and X1800 in November 2005 and then the Radeon X1900 earlier this year, as it meant that every current graphics card is now fully DirectX 9.0c compliant, and now NVIDIA has slotted the GeForce 7600 into the mid-range. The GeForce 7600 uses half of the hardware that you find inside the GeForce 7900 GTX so you get 12 pixel pipelines, eight Raster Operations Units (ROP's), five pixel shaders, a 128-bit memory controller with support for up to 256MB of memory. The GPU comes in two versions: the GeForce 7600 GS and GT.
The GeForce 7600 GS has a core speed of 400MHz and 256MB of DDR2 memory that runs at an effective 800MHz, and which is intended to be used with a passive cooler to give silent running. The performance option is the GeForce 7600 GT which has a 560MHz core and uses GDDR 3 memory with an effective speed of 1.4GHz, which is exactly what you'll find in the ASUS Extreme N7600 GT. As far as we can see the only thing that distinguishes the ASUS from NVIDIA's reference design is the ASUS sticker on the cooling fan so it's fair to expect that its performance will be typical of the breed.
Unfortunately, we didn't have a Radeon X1800 GTO to hand so we were unable to compare it with the GeForce 7600 GT. However, we did have a Sapphire Radeon X1800 XL, and the ATI card was a comfortable winner. We have no problem believing that the Radeon X1800 GTO and the GeForce 7600 GT will have very similar performance. However, the Radeon X1800 GTO costs £30 more than the GeForce 7600 GT and is only £10 cheaper than basic versions of the Radeon X1800 XL. So if you're going down this route we suggest that you ignore the GTO and plump for the XL.
Once you break the £200 barrier you're approaching the point where you can consider a GeForce 7900 GT, which means that you'll have a completely different decision to make. Getting back to the ASUS Extreme N7600 GT, we had mixed views. The performance of the card is very good at this price poin. The inclusion of the King Kong game is welcome. The only other goody in the box is an HDTV Component cable so the value-for-money decision comes down in favour of Asus, but only just. Our biggest complaint about the card is the noise of the fan. No doubt another manufacturer will come up with a quieter version.
NVIDIA's new GeForce 7600 GT is an incredibly impressive mid-range graphics chip. ASUS hasn't done much with its version, the Extreme N7600 GT, apart from re-badging a reference card and bundling a copy of King Kong but heck, what else do you want?
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