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XFX GeForce 7600 GT 256MB XXX Edition Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 20 June 2006 |
nV News reveals a review on the XFX GeForce 7600 GT 256MB XXX Edition video card. Do you remember a few years back, when the GeForce 4 line was brand new and the promise of performance from those cards was causing a gleamin every gamer's eye? The top of the line graphics card when the GeForce 4 was brand new cost around $250. These days, $250 barely buys a decent processor, let alone a graphics card that is worthy of bragging about. The people at XFX would like to change the negative stigma associated with a mid-range or budget video card and their solution was the supercharged GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition of NVIDIA's versatile and formidable mid-range GPU.
 XFX GeForce 7600 GT 256MB XXX Edition Review
Rounding out the top end of the middle road of the GeForce 7 series, the GeForce 7600 GT XXX is nothing to scoff at. Clocked at 590/1600MHz on the core and memory respectively, the XXX Edition packs some serious firepower. And at sub $200 prices, it seems quite and enticing purchase. Can the allure of a cheap pricetag, insane clock speeds and all the features of the GeForce 7 series combine to make a card worth spending your money on? Comparing the XXX Edition to its vanilla flavored brethen, which comes clocked at 560/1400MHz it surely shows this is a top notch board.
Coming off the ridiculous overclock that the Inno3D GeForce 7600 GST allowed, I was pretty psyched about pushing the XXX cards to their limits. I had visions of 700MHz cores and 1.8GHz memory that would allow for graphics so awesome my eyes would bleed. But sadly, it seems that XFX has already found the limits of both the GeForce 7600 core and the GDDR3 memory that keeps those cores fed. Using CoolBits the drivers actually clocked the core to 592MHz and bumped the memory from to about 1622MHz. When I tried to put the card at 610/1650MHz all benchmarks would just fail.
XFX has put together a GeForce 7600 based card that is nothing short of stunning in the way it performs. Pushing the core and memory to their utter limits, the GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition cards provide a level of gaming that has finally allowed me to retire my trusty GeForce 6800 GT's. I'm going to miss them as they have served me so well for so long, but passing up two cards are powerful as these would be a huge mistake. The XXX Edition cards are for the budget gamer who wants SLI but can't afford to go with the higher-end GeForce 7900 GT, GTX or the GeForce 7950 GX2.
For less than $200, half the price of a single GeFOrce 6800 GT when it first came to market two summers ago, performance that often rivals a pair of those GeForce 6800 GT's is available. I cannot say how impressed I am with these cards, especially considering their mid-range placement on the GeForce 7 series family tree and I cannot recommend them highly enough for anyone coming from a previous generation of cards looking to get awesome performance but not break the bank. Thanks to XFX for these cards and all the work they've done to make such an impressive offering.
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