NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
The NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT is the best mid-range graphics card you can buy right now.
Based on the G73 graphics core, the GeForce 7600 GT is manufactured on the 90 nm process technology. With a power consumption of only 67W, it is a very power-efficient chip.
The GeForce 7600 GT has a 12 pixel pipeline core with 5 vertex units, all running at same speed of 560MHz. This gives the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT a fillrate of 6.7 Gigapixels/sec. and a vertex output of 700 million vertices per sec.
All GeForce 7600 GT cards come with 256MB of GDDR3 memory running at 700MHz. The GDDR3 memory communicate with the GPU via a 128-bit interface. This gives the card a memory bandwidth of 22.4GB/s.
Here's a comparison of the GeForce 7600 GT with its famous predecessor, the GeForce 6600 GT. If you think the GeForce 6600 GT was a really sweet deal, you will love the GeForce 7600 GT.
GeForce 7600 GT |
GeForce 6600 GT |
Difference |
|
Architecture |
G73 |
NV43 |
- |
Manufacturing Process |
0.09 Micron |
0.11 Micron |
0.02 Micron finer process |
Transistor Count |
177 Million |
146 Million |
31 Million more transistors |
DirectX Support |
9.0c |
9.0c |
- |
Interface |
PCIe |
AGP/PCIe |
- |
Vertex Pipelines |
5 |
3 |
2 additional vertex pipelines |
Vertex
Shader Version |
3.0 |
3.0 |
- |
Pixel
/ Texture Pipelines |
12 x 1 |
8 x 1 |
4 additional pixel pipelines |
Pixel
Shader Version |
3.0 |
3.0 |
- |
Core
Speed |
560 MHz |
500 MHz |
60 MHz faster core speed |
Fill
Rate |
6,700 MTexels/s |
4,000 MTexels/s |
2,700 MTexels/s more fill rate |
Memory
Bus Width |
128-bits |
128-bits |
- |
Memory Type |
GDDR3 |
GDDR3 |
- |
Memory
Speed |
700 MHz |
500 MHz |
200 MHz faster memory speed |
Memory Bandwidth |
22.40 GB/s |
16.00 GB/s |
6.40 GB/s more memory bandwidth |
The GeForce 7600 GT performed very well in all the tests we put it through. In most cases, it was just 10-20% slower than the GeForce 7800 GT. In Quake 4, it actually beat the GeForce 7800 GT!
This is really impressive as the GeForce 7800 GT is a much more expensive graphics card with 20 pixel pipelines and 8 vertex units. It also has 43% more memory bandwidth than the GeForce 7600 GT. For a lower-end card to come so close to its performance is quite an achievement.
Although we could not overclock our GeForce 7600 GT much, many people have reported hitting much higher clock speeds. Even with our poor overclocking results, the GeForce 7600 GT still managed to come very close to the performance of the GeForce 7800 GT.
With a little luck in overclocking, the GeForce 7600 GT can actually match the performance of the higher-end GeForce 7800 GT for a lot less damage to your wallet. As such, we think the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT offers the best value-for-money for our Christmas gaming PC.
For more information on the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT graphics card, click here.
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