Its got two doors, 400 horsepower, 400 pound-feet of torque, and is powered by the same LS2 engine used in the Chevrolet Corvette. If you're an auto buff, chances are you know which car we're talking about. None other than Pontiac's GTO. Now NVIDIA's got a GTO board of their own, and like the Pontiac GTO it's an import that has been built to do one thing and one thing well; deliver lots of performance bang for the buck. The GeForce 7900 GTO is a derivative of NVIDIA's faster GeForce 7900 GTX. The 7900 GTO is built on the same board design and cooling as the GTX, in fact the exact same GeForce 7900 GTX graphics chip is used on the GTO; both GPU's are clocked at 650MHz. - FiringSquad

EVGA e-GeForce 7900 GTO 512MB PCI-E Review

The key difference is that the GTO's 512MB of memory runs at slower speeds than the GeForce 7900 GTX, just 1.32GHz effective, which is the same speed as the GeForce 7900 GS and GT. In comparison, the memory on the GeForce 7900 GTX runs at 1.6GHz effective. At first glance, EVGA's e-GeForce 7900 GTO board is a dead-ringer for a GeForce 7900 GTX, both cards look identical. Physically EVGA has made no changes to the GeForce 7900 GTX board design for the GeForce 7900 GTO, they're using the exact same board design and components, right down to the memory modules.

This particular point has led to lots of speculation about where the memory has come from and whether or not it is memory that wasn't up to task for use on GeForce 7900 GTX boards. Frankly we don't know the answer to that question. What we do know is that EVGA's running the memory modules on their GTO boards at slightly lower voltages than the GeForce 7900 GTX memory. As any experienced overclocker will tell you, higher voltage is often needed to hit higher speeds. It's also possible that EVGA may be running the memory on these GTO boards with tighter timings than the memory on GTX cards.

A few weeks ago we took a look at the GeForce 7950 GT and GeForce 7900 GS and found them both to be excellent competitors at their price points, and now comes the GeForce 7900 GTO which basically blows them both out of the water! The factory overclocked GeForce 7950 GT boards still have their place, stock-for-stock the EVGA KO delivered slightly more performance than the GTO in our testing in many games, and of course don't forget the added benefit of HDCP in the GeForce 7950 GT. On the other hand, the GeForce 7900 GTO sells for a little less than the GeForce 7950 GT, so it's a close call between the two cards.

We'd probably give the edge to the GeForce 7900 GTO overall, not just because of its lower price, but just as important, its near-silent dual slot cooler. We've been huge fans of NVIDIA's quad heatpipe cooler, it not only runs nearly silently, it's also a terrific performer. However, if you're into watching high resolution movies on your PC though, the GeForce 7950 GT's HDCP support might come in handy down the road. EVGA's e-GeForce 7900 GTO is without a doubt though, one of the best bang for the buck cards on the market right now. For about $250 you're really getting an excellent card.