Noise, Overclocking and 2D Quality

The same cooler as on the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 is mounted on the GeForce 7900 GTX and it works as quietly, too. You can hardly hear the graphics card even with your ear close to the working computer. We don’t think you won’t want to replace the cooler even if perfect silence is your main priority. For comparison, the Radeon X1900 XTX produces some noise even when its blower is working at a reduced speed, and when the speed is high, the noise is hardly bearable due to the irritating tone produced by the resonating plastic casing.

It’s worse with the noise characteristics of the GeForce 7900 GT. The small blower this graphics card’s cooler is equipped with is always working at a high speed and is always audible against the noise from other computer components (CPU, power supply, hard disk drives). We didn’t find any traces of a speed management system on our sample of the card, but we think off-the-shelf samples of the GeForce 7900 GT will have it. The fan speed can be controlled with the latest version of RivaTuner, but we wouldn’t recommend you to do so since the GeForce 7900 GT cooler is small and may not cope with its job if the fan speed is set too low.

Franking speaking, we don’t think the GeForce 7900 GT cooler is half as good as the GeForce 7900 GTX one. It is small and has a tiny fan, so it is rather noisy, yet not very efficient. If you are going to overclock your GeForce 7900 GT or if you just want to have a silent computer, you may want to think about a more efficient cooling solution. It’s possible some manufacturers will equip their GeForce 7900 GT with such coolers right away.

An attempt to overclock our GeForce 7900 GTX brought modest results: the GPU clock rate grew up from 650 to 680MHz. We used the standard overclocking options available in the ForceWare driver, and we suspect the vertex processors of the chip were the limiting factor as they had to work at 730MHz. The memory was stable at 920 (1840) MHz or a little higher than it is rated for. Well, even this modest frequency growth is an achievement for chips that are originally clocked at their limit. We might have been luckier using water or cryogen cooling, but this kind of overclocking is generally costly and few people are actually engaged in it.

The GeForce 7900 GT is manufactured out of G71 chips that couldn’t pass the frequency check for GeForce 7900 GTX, so we hadn’t expected we would raise the core frequency of our sample of that card to 600MHz, not to mention 650MHz. That was indeed true. With its stock cooler and with a little help from an additional 120mm fan the card was stable at 560MHz core frequency and 800 (1600) MHz memory frequency. This is quite a good result for the humble cooler the GeForce 7900 GT is equipped with. Of course, the overclocking potential of different samples of that card is going to vary somewhat, yet we think an overclocker may be interested anyway considering the recommended price of $299.

As for 2D image quality, the new graphics cards from Nvidia produced a crystal-sharp image in every mode supported by our monitors, up to 1800x1440@75Hz, like most other modern graphics cards do.