Conclusion

Frankly speaking, I had hoped for a somewhat bigger performance growth from the volt-modded EVGA GeForce 7600 GS 256MB. It was the graphics memory that turned to be the bottleneck because its frequency is much lower than that of 7600 GT cards. The core voltage increase, however, helped overclock the GPU to the same frequency as that of the senior model. Taking the frequency of the 7600 GS as the reference point, there is an almost 100% frequency gain! Few chips are capable of such achievements and such graphics cards are sure to become popular and demanded in their price category.

As for the market perspectives and shopping choices, you can note that we’ve seen all that before: a junior model, a senior model, and, later on, a third model that becomes the golden mean in terms of price/performance. That was the case with the GeForce 6600 with DDR2 memory which, however, was not widespread and only hit the market in limited quantities, and now the GeForce 7600 GS with GDDR3 memory is about to arrive. Fortunately, Nvidia didn’t wait till the end of the lifecycle of the 7600 series and released the in-between product in proper time.

Basing on the results of today’s tests I can tell you one thing. If you don’t have the money to buy a more expensive graphics card, take a GeForce 7600 GS with DDR2 memory and overclock it, if you want, but despite the sky-high core frequency, the memory frequency will be the bottleneck. And no volt-modding can help here.

But if you’ve got $15-20 more in your wallet, look for the “right” GeForce 7600 GS with normal memory (I mean GDDR3, of course). It won’t disappoint you!