X-bit labs

XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition Graphics Card Review

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 07/27/2006 | 11:49 AM ]

Nvidia’s main mainstream weapon these days, GeForce 7600 GT graphics accelerator, has already been mentioned in one of our previous reviews devoted to ATI Radeon X1800 GTO performance. Despite the 128-bit memory bus, it demonstrated the level of performance comparable with that of the ATI’s solution, and sometimes was even much faster than the latter. Today we are going to take a real close look at the XFX solution based on this Nvidia chip – XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition.

Table of contents:

• Nvidia G73: Specification
  
• XFX GeForce 7600 GT XXX Edition
  
• Package and Accessories
  
• PCB Design and Cooling System
  
• Power Consumption and Overclocking
  
• Noise and 2D Quality
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Battlefield 2
  
• The Chronicles of Riddick
  
• Call of Duty 2
  
• Far Cry
  
• F.E.A.R.
  
• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
  
• Half-Life 2
  
• Half-Life 2: Episode One
  
• Prey
  
• Quake 4
  
• Serious Sam 2
  
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
  
• Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
  
• Performance in Simulators
  
• Pacific Fighters
  
• X3: Reunion
  
• Performance in Strategies
  
• Age of Empires 3
  
• Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War
  
• Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 1.2.0
  
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 1.0.2
  
• Conclusion
  

As all of our readers surely know, the G71 and G73 graphics processors were announced by Nvidia at the same time. The former chip is meant for high-performance solutions, ranging from the GeForce 7900 GT to the dual-processor monster GeForce 7950 GX2, and has been covered extensively in our reviews (for details see our articles called Nvidia GeForce 7900 GT Review and Two for One: Nvidia's Dual-Chip GeForce 7950 GX2 Reviewed). The latter hasn’t been tested in our labs yet although it was mentioned in our review of the ATI Radeon X1800 GTO called PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO Graphics Card: the Best in Its Class?. We think it’s time we made our amends to this graphics solution.

So, the G73 chip was originally designed by Nvidia as a graphics processor for mainstream and budget-mainstream graphics cards. This new GPU was to replace the out-dated NV42 and NV43 chips which had been used in GeForce 6800 GS, GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6600 GT cards and to provide the user with all the capabilities of the GeForce 7 architecture at an affordable price.

One G73-based graphics card model was announced at first. It was the GeForce 7600 GT which occupied the price range of $149-199, and later on the budget-mainstream GeForce 7600 GS was included into the 7600 series. In this review we are going to take a scrutinizing look at the former of these products, at one available version of the GeForce 7600 GT graphics card.