NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT Graphics Card |
Even though the new NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT is a mid-range card designed to replace GeForce 6600 GT, its performance was far better than expected. It actually came close to the performance of the GeForce 7800 GT, a high-end card which costs twice as much. Just like its higher-end GeForce 7900 brothers, the GeForce 7600 GT was fabricated using the 90nm die process. The finer manufacturing process allows to run at a higher clock speed and yet use less power and emit less heat. Of course, NVIDIA distanced the GeForce 7600 GT from its expensive brothers by giving it only half as many pixel pipelines and half the memory bus width. But thanks to a higher core and memory bus speed, the GeForce 7600 GT performed well enough to be an enticing option for those on a more restrictive budget. The lower power requirement also has a nice side benefit - it doesn't need or come with a PCI Express power connector. This means you can most probably use your old PSUs, even if you want to run two cards in SLI. However, we feel it would be quite pointless to run two GeForce 7600 GTs in SLI. The GeForce 7600 GT's greatest strength is its great value. It offers great performance for an affordable price. Buying two of these cards will cancel out that advantage without giving you a truly significant advantage in performance. Instead of buying two GeForce 7600 GT cards, you can actually buy a GeForce 7900 GT card with cash to spare. The GeForce 7900 GT easily beats the GeForce 7600 GT SLI, making the SLI setup both costly and redundant. In addition, the GeForce 7600 GT wasn't very overclockable. Of course, we could have tested an "unlucky" card. We only managed to overclock the core up to 601MHz and the memory bus up to 791MHz. Some manufacturers are actually selling "OC versions" of the card with the core overclocked to 600MHz. So, this card may still have some overclocking potential that we haven't been able to detect in our sample. There is no doubt that the new NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT is a very good mid-range card. It offers great performance at an affordable price. For those who cannot afford its more expensive brethrens, the GeForce 7600 GT is certainly a very attractive choice. For more details, read our Comprehensive Review! |
MSRP |
$199 |
Lowest PriceGrabber Price |
|
Review |
|
Architecture |
G73 |
Process Technology |
90 nm |
Number of Transistors |
177 Million |
Die Size |
NA |
Pixel Pipelines |
12 Pixel Pipelines |
ROPs |
8 ROPs - 8 colour, 8 blend |
Core Clock |
560 MHz |
Fillrate |
6.7 Gigapixels / sec. |
Memory Interface |
2-way 64-bits
memory interface |
Memory Buffer |
256 MB GDDR3 |
Memory Clock |
700 MHz |
Memory Bandwidth |
22.4 GB/s |
Vertex Units |
5 Vertex Units |
Vertex Clock |
560 MHz |
Vertex Output |
700 million vertices / sec. |
Power Consumption |
67 W |
Graphics Bus |
PCI Express |
Shader Model Version |
SM 3.0 |
NVIDIA IntelliSample Technology |
4.0 |
NVIDIA SLI Technology |
Yes |
NVIDIA Quad SLI Technology |
No |
NVIDIA TurboCache Technology |
No |
64-bit Texture Filtering and Blending |
Yes |
DVI Support |
Single dual-linked DVI, integrated into the GPU |
Features |
Microsoft®
DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 Support |
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