Video cards

Introduction

The entry-level section of the mainstream market, or more directly the $100-$110 price point, is a very important one for the video card market. Many gamers view a C-note as the starting point for any video card purchase, just as many OEM vendors like this range for gaming-equipped systems. NVIDIA certainly recognizes this fact, and after releasing the powerful GeForce 7600 GT card, followed that up with its lower-clocked GeForce 7600 GS cousin. This bridged the gap between the high and low ends of the mainstream market, and gave NVIDIA a GeForce 7 Series card for virtually any budget.

The GeForce 7600 GS

The GeForce 7600 GS is based on the 90nm G73 core, which is the same basic chip that powers GeForce 7600 GT. This GPU took over for the popular GeForce 6600-based cards, and brought a GeForce 7-level feature set into the mainstream graphics market. The GeForce 7600 GS GPU features the same base specifications as the GeForce 7600 GT, which offers 12 pixel pipes, 12 texture units, 12 pixel shaders, and 5 vertex pipelines. The memory architecture is also shared between the two cards, and features a 128-bit link to 256MB of GDDR2. Other standard features of the GeForce 7600 GS include NVIDIA SLI, CineFX 4.0, Intellisample 4.0, UltraShadow II, and PureVideo.

Where the GeForce 7600 GS and GT cards diverge is in the area of clock speeds. In order to properly differentiate the two cards, and save a few bucks with the lower-end model, both core and memory speeds are lower on the GeForce 7600 GS. The default GeForce 7600 GS core speed is 400 MHz and the memory is clocked at 800 MHz, which is lower than the GeForce 7600 GT's 560 MHz core and 1.4 GHz memory speeds. The GeForce 7600 GS still translates into high fillrate (4.8 GTexel/s and 4.8 GPixels/s) and memory bandwidth (12.8 GB/s) specifications for its class, and compares quite well against the Radeon X1600 Pro/XT and Radeon X1650 Pro competition.

The Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GS 256MB Card

The overall design of the Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GS card is similar to the NVIDIA reference format, but there have been some enhancements. The card features passive cooling through a large heatsink, but Gigabyte has added on their silent-pipe technology, which usually sends the heat to the back of the card, but in this case, it draws the heat through the pipe and onto the attached heatsink fins. Clock speeds are another area with a difference, and Gigabyte has clocked their GeForce 7600 GS 256MB card at 450 MHz core and 800 MHz memory, or an additional 50 MHZ on the core side. As with other models, the Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GS card is a single-slot PCI Express card that is 7.5" in length, and is a more diminutive GeForce 7600-based option for SFF computers.

Although the Gigabyte card features a large heatsink, this doesn't create a larger footprint and its weight is consistent with the 300-350 grams of a standard GeForce 7600 GT or Radeon X1600 XT card. The backplate of the Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GS 256MB features a dual-link DVI port (offering resolutions up to 2560x1600), a VGA-out port, and an S-Video/HDTV-out port - an HDTV breakout cable is included. Like other GeForce 7600-based cards, the Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GS card does not require any type of external power source.

In addition to the HDTV cable, Gigabyte has also bundled a full version of Call of Juarez (worldwide, except America and German), although this has been substituted with Xpand Rally or Serious Sam II for US buyers. Call of Juarez is a very fun western FPS with a nod to Preacher, but as its US release date is still some time off, this discrepancy in game bundles is understandable. Another interesting feature of the Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GS is the ability to easily update the VGA BIOS from the Gigabyte website.

To give a better idea of the architecture of the various mainstream video cards we see competing directly against the Gigabyte GeForce 7600 GS 256MB, here is a chart outlining the key architectural features of each GPU:

The next chart provides the base clock speed, bandwidth and performance specifications that go along with the above listings, and helps paint a better picture of the individual graphics cards and their capabilities.

Of course, the best performance metric is real-world testing, and to that end, we've assembled a wide range of game benchmarks in the next section.