Date:
Friday , December 01, 2006
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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GeForce 7900 GT Roundup

Looking for an affordable high-performance video card but having trouble figuring out what would be best? We evaluate 7900 GTs from XFX, BFGTech and ASUS then compare them with a newer GeForce 7950 GT to see if it really is worth the extra money.

Introduction

While the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT GPU has been launched the GeForce 7900 GT, which sits just right below it in the hierarchy, is still found to be priced well under the GeForce 7950 GT. The price difference has the GeForce 7950 GT models coming in at an average of $50 more expensive than a GeForce 7900 GT can be purchased for today. At this price range $50 can make or break a purchasing decision.

The NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT GPU is based on the G71 core architecture, which is the same core you will find in the GeForce 7900 GTX. This means it fully supports DirectX 9.0c with Shader Model 3.0 for both pixel and vertex. To meet a lower price point however it has been reduced in performance by lowering the GPU core clock frequency and memory size and frequency. However, NVIDIA has kept the same amount of pixel shader processors (24), vertex shader processors (8) and raster operators (16) just like the GeForce 7900 GTX. Therefore the GeForce 7900 GT is actually just a GeForce 7900 GTX but with lower clock speeds.

The GPU core frequency has been set at 450 MHz (compared to 550 MHz on the 7950 GT and 650MHz on the 7900 GTX) and the memory frequency is set at 1.32 GHz (compared to 1.4 GHz on the 7950 GT and 1.6 GHz on the 7900 GTX). NVIDIA also very freely allows add-in-board manufacturers to offer “factory overclocked” versions of video cards based on this GPU. That means that depending on what brand and model you buy you could receive a video card with a much faster core clock and memory clock frequency. In turn that means you may even find some video cards coming close to 7950 GT clock speeds. We will be looking at some video cards today that are like this.

GeForce 7900 GT or GeForce 7950 GT

If you look at the hierarchy you will find that the 7900 GT, 7950 GT and 7900 GTX are very close to each other in specifications. Each one has the same architecture with the same pipeline and pixel shader processor configurations. The only difference is either clock speeds or memory size. The GeForce 7950 GT and GeForce 7900 GTX both utilize 512 MB of RAM. However, in our evaluation of the 7950 GT we found that 512MB of RAM didn’t really help much in games with that GPU. The GeForce 7900 GT on the other hand uses 256MB of RAM and thus the cost is a bit cheaper in the end. GeForce 7900 GTs can be had online now for around $270 while 7950 GTs are up in the $320 range.

We understand this is very close, but in today’s economy every little bit you can save surely helps. That is why we will be comparing the GeForce 7900 GTs to the GeForce 7950 GT, to see what the real-world benefits of it are in games compared to the GeForce 7900 GTs and to ultimately see if it is worth the extra coin.

On the following pages we will explore the three GeForce 7900 GT based video cards we are evaluating today.