Date:
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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XFX GeForce 7900 GS 480M Extreme

NVIDIA is announcing two GPUs at popular price points today continuing their current GeForce 7 family. The GeForce 7900 GS is today's hard-launch and we’ve got a full retail package XFX brand GeForce 7900 GS that we evaluate in seven games.

Introduction

It seems that right now both ATI and NVIDIA are very aggressively pushing new video cards out into the market to fill that ever growing desire for faster and cheaper video cards. This is great for gamers since competition helps drive prices down and performance up. Two weeks ago ATI launched a slew of new video cards into the market from the value-end to the high-end. Now this week NVIDIA is here to announce some new GPUs. Sorry folks, no DX10 GPU announcements yet. Instead, this is a continuation of NVIDIA’s GeForce 7 series line. NVIDIA is launching some new GPUs that bring higher performance to some very popular price points.

GeForce 7900 GS

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Say hello to the GeForce 7900 GS. Famous for their hard launches, NVIDIA does not disappoint with this GPU; there is retail availability today. In fact, the video card we are evaluating today is a full retail package from XFX.

There isn’t anything unfamiliar about this GPU. Take everything you know about the GeForce 7900 GT and cut the pipelines down a bit and you have the GeForce 7900 GS. Both are G71-based GPUs at 90nm. What this allows NVIDIA to do is to bring a high performance video card down to the $199 dollar level for the consumer. Actually, the GeForce 7900 GS isn’t that new, it has been enjoying some time with OEM’s and system integrators for a while. Only now that it is coming into retail for end users like you and me.

The GeForce 7900 GS has the same clock frequencies as the 7900 GT, 450 MHz GPU core frequency and 660 MHz (1.32 GHz) memory frequency. Where it differs is in the pipeline layout. The GeForce 7900 GS has 20 pixel shader units versus the 24 of the 7900 GT. That cuts the fillrate down from 10.8 GPixels/sec to 9 GPixels/sec. The vertex shader units have also taken a slight reduction to 7 on the GeForce 7900 GS versus 8 on the 7900 GT. Raster Operator count is the same at 16 with both GPUs. Standard with this GPU will be 256MB of GDDR3. The power consumption is quoted as pulling 82W under max power.

While the GPU and PCB are familiar there has been an upgrade to the fan. The fan is now a variable speed dynamic fan that changes fan speed based on temperature to help reduce noise. Video cards based on this GPU will support Dual Dual-Link DVI and HDTV ports as well as support for HDCP which is up to the add-in-board manufacturers.

GeForce 7950 GT

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This next GPU being announced today is not going to be a hard launch. While we can discuss this GPU now NVIDIA is urging reviewers to hold off on releasing evaluations until the video card is available on shelves September 14th. We just received our GeForce 7950 GT this week so we will have an evaluation around the 14th.

The GeForce 7950 GT is meant to hit a higher performance segment at the $299 dollar level. If you look at the specifications it also seems somewhat familiar, in fact, it looks very close in specifications to a GeForce 7900 GTX, but with a much lower price.

Again this is a G71 based video card at 90nm. This one has all its pipes in tact, 24 pixel shader units, 8 vertex units and 16 ROPs. The core frequency is set at 550 MHz (100 MHz lower than a 7900 GTX). The memory is set at 700 MHz (1.4 GHz also 100 MHz DDR slower than a 7900 GTX). Standard memory will be 512MB of GDDR3.

Basically you have a video card that is 100 MHz slower on the core and memory compared to the 7900 GTX but all in a single-slot solution and priced cheaper (most 7900 GTX’s are around $100 more expensive). The same fan upgrade has also been employed on this video card. Again, availability won’t be until September 14th and we will have our evaluation of it around that time.

The Competition

The big question on everyone’s mind now is how this compare to the competition? If you go simply by what NVIDIA recommends comparing these new GPUs to we could compare the GeForce 7900 GS to the Radeon X1800 GTO and the GeForce 7950 GT to the X1900 GT. However, it isn’t as simple as that.

We like to go by street prices here when applicable, street prices as in what we can find online at various e-tail stores. In our investigating we found there are some places and brands where Radeon X1800 GTOs are selling for under $199, one place in fact we found where a retail card was going for $150, but other places had them around $199. The Radeon X1900 GT also fluctuates depending on where you go and what brand it is. We found some in fact that were selling in retail boxes for $199, same price as the new 7900 GS. We also found some selling as high as $290, well out of the range of the 7900 GS and inline with the 7950 GT.

In order to get a thorough evaluation and cover all the bases since the price ranges are very erratic we have included an X1800 GTO and an X1900 GT in the evaluation for comparison.