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Introduction
No matter what ATI and NVIDIA throw at each other to win the performance crown, most of the cards sold are of the lower-end spectrum. As such, both GPU giants regularly release lower-end cards for the masses.
When NVIDIA released the GeForce 7800 GT and 7800 GTX, it was a certainty that they would eventually release an entry-level GPU for the GeForce 7 series. The new GeForce 7300 GS is that GPU.
Designed to replace the GeForce 6200 as the top entry-level card, the GeForce 7300 GS will offer all the features of the GeForce 7 series with a boost in processing power and memory bandwidth. Here's a comparison chart of the GeForce 7300 GS with the GeForce 6200 and GeForce 5200 GPUs.
| GeForce 7300 GS |
GeForce 6200 |
GeForce 5200 |
|
| Manufacturing Process |
0.09 Micron |
0.11 Micron |
0.13 Micron |
| Transistor Count |
112 Million |
75 Million |
80 Million |
| DirectX Support |
9.0c |
9.0c |
9.0 |
| Interface |
PCIe |
AGP/PCIe |
AGP |
| Vertex Pipelines |
3 |
3 |
2 |
| Vertex
Shader Version |
3.0 |
3.0 |
2.0 |
| Pixel
/ Texture Pipelines |
4 x 1 |
4 x 1 |
4 x 1 |
| Pixel
Shader Version |
3.0 |
3.0 |
2.0 |
| Core
Speed |
550 MHz |
300 MHz |
250 MHz |
| Fill
Rate |
2200 MTexels/s |
1200 MTexels/s |
1000 MTexels/s |
| Memory
Bus Width |
64-bits |
128-bits |
128-bits |
| Memory Type |
DDR DDR2 GDDR3 |
DDR |
DDR |
| Memory
Speed |
400 MHz |
276 MHz |
250 MHz |
| Memory Bandwidth |
6.40 GB/s |
8.83 GB/s |
8.00 GB/s |
As you can see from the table above, the GeForce 7300 GS was given a large boost in fill rate, compared to the GeForce 6200. Unfortunately, NVIDIA cut its memory bus width down to only 64-bits. That effectively reduced its memory bandwidth, even with a higher memory clock speed.
Of course, the table above is only based on official specifications from NVIDIA. The actual GPU and memory clock speeds are left entirely to card manufacturers. There will be some variation in clock speeds and therefore, performance between GeForce 7300 GS cards from different manufacturers.
For more on the GeForce 7300 GS itself, take a look at our NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS Tech Report! Now, let's a look at Gigabyte's GeForce 7300 GS solution - the newly released Gigabyte GV-NX73G128D graphics card!
The Package
The Gigabyte GV-NX73G128D came in a large cardboard box. The front showed the card's key features while the back pimps the virtues of the card.
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Front |
Back |
The box is actually pretty big for what it contains. As expected, the bundled accessories is spartan. All you get, besides the card itself, are the HDTV converter, a manual and a CD.
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List Of Contents • One Gigabyte GV-NX73G128D graphics card
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Contents |
Unlike the ASUS Extreme N7300GS which we reviewed recently, this card did not come with any DVI-to-VGA converter. So, don't expect to get dual VGA outputs with this card.
