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eVGA GeForce

7600 GS

Two Birds, one Thrown Video Card

by Josh Walrath

Testing

            Unfortunately I do not currently have any of the competing ATI products to pit against the 7600 GS, so to make up for that fact I have compared it to the louder/hotter/more expensive 7600 GT.  We can see exactly what kind of performance delta is expected from the hard running 7600 GT to the silent 7600 GS in stock form.  I did not include Oblivion in this review as I am still developing a testing routine for this shader heavy title.

The 7600 GS (top) is about the same size as the previous mid-range champ, the 6600 DDR-2.  Note that the 6600 DDR-2 did not have the SLI connector at the top.

            I also used Windows XP 64 to test the compatibility of these titles, drivers, and video cards in a 64 bit environment.  I had no issues with loading the operating system with many of the latest drivers for all components used in this review.  All applications seem to run fine and without issue.

            The 84.25 drivers from NVIDIA are the latest for this operating system, but unfortunately the supersampling and multisampling Transparency AA functionality is currently broken in Windows XP 64.  There is no set timeline for this situation to be fixed.  As such, Transparency AA is not tested.  I set texture quality to High Quality, so no AF optimizations are used.

            I tested the 7600 GS against the eVGA 7600 GT CO Superclocked, which is a higher performing part than the standard 7600 GT (560 core stock vs. 600 core CO and 700 MHz DDR stock vs. 780 MHz DDR).  This combination of core and memory clocks makes the CO version about 10% faster overall than a stock 7600 GT.

Test Setup

AMD Athlon X2 3800+ clocked at 2.4 GHz (courtesy of AMD)

Tyan K8E Tomcat Motherboard (courtesy of Tyan)

OCZ 2 GB PC3200 DDR (2:3:2:7 timings)

Hitachi 250 GB SATA HD

Auzentech X-Mystique Soundcard (courtesy of Auzentech)

Toshiba DVD-ROM Drive

Antec Neopower 480 Power Supply

Windows XP 64 Professional

Forceware 84.25 video card drivers

nForce for AMD 6.69 platform drivers

Test Results

3D Mark 2005

            This faithful, yet aging benchmark still packs a pretty good visual punch and utilizes SM 2.0 and 3.0 code very well.  The stock benchmark was run.

            The 7600 GT is really fast.  There is no doubt about that.  The 3745 score for the 7600 GS compares very well from previous cards though.  The 6600 DDR-2 in stock form produces a score around 2932 while a 6600 GT scores around 3789.  The 7600 GS is able to produce 6600 GT performance at a lower price, as well as being silent.  The 6600 GT does have a pretty nice advantage by running 500 MHz GDDR-3 vs. the 7600 GS’s 400 MHz GDDR-2.  In more shader bound applications though, the 7600 GS would probably show a nice performance advantage though its core is clocked 100 MHz slower than the 6600 GT.  In most other applications, the 7600 GS is faster than a 6600 GT. 

3D Mark 2006

            This brand new benchmark really pushes the pixels, and even high end cards do not show smooth performances across many of the tests.  This test encompasses SM 2.0, SM 3.0, and HDR rendering.

            The 7600 GS does put up some good numbers for its price range, but I think an area where it really is sorely lacking is the extra memory bandwidth that could really set this GPU free.  Even 450 MHz (900 MHz DDR) memory would have been much preferable to the current 400 MHz GDDR-2.  Unfortunately, that isn’t a common speed for GDDR-2. 

World of Warcraft

            I took a nice run outside of Goldshire with all settings maxed out in World of Warcraft and recorded the results with FRAPS.  This area of the map features a lot of trees and foliage, which can really load up current graphics cards.  I used 4X AA and 8X AF in testing.

            We can see that in this situation the 7600 GS is not all that much slower than the 7600 GT.  It is only when resolutions higher than 1600 x 1200 are used that the 7600 GS becomes pretty choppy and unplayable.  Getting almost 30 fps in WoW at 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA is pretty impressive for a budget level card. 

Doom 3

            This shader and lighting heavy OpenGL title is still a benchmark favorite, and with games such as Quake 4 and the upcoming Quake Wars utilizing this engine, it is always good to see how video cards play it.  High quality settings were enabled with 2X AA and 8X AF.  The timedemo demo1 was used in playback mode.

            Doom 3 is a much different situation than WoW was for these two cards.  The 7600 GT CO is a lot faster in every situation, and it is even playable at 2048 x 1536 with 2X AA and 8X AF.  Still, the 7600 GS will significantly outpace a 6600 DDR-2 or 6600 GT in this title.

Next: More Results

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