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The GeForce 7600 GT

eVGA Superclock Style

by Josh Walrath

Testing

            Unfortunately I didn’t have an X1600 XT for testing purposes, as it is the closest competitor for the 7600 GT from ATI.  I had debated using a 6600 GT clocked at 525 MHz core, but after a few tests I discovered that the 7600 GT CO just destroyed that particular card.  I thought the comparison needed to be a bit more interesting, so I decided to throw in a 6800 GT.  I initially figured that the 7600 GT and 6800 GT would come out to be about even, but I was quite wrong in that assumption.

The eVGA 7600 GT CO Superclocked looks just about like any other video card out there, but luckily it performs a whole lot better than most.

Test Setup

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

Tyan Tomcat K8E nForce 4 Ultra motherboard (courtesy of Tyan)

2 GB PC3200 OCZ DDR SDRAM @ 2:3:2:7 latencies

HDA/Auzentech X-Mystique soundcard

200 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM hard drive

Toshiba DVD-ROM

Windows XP Professional, SP2

DirectX 9.0c

nForce 6.70 motherboard drivers

Forceware 84.17 drivers for both 7600 GT and 6800 GT

NVIDIA control panel image settings to High Quality

PureVideo Decoder for use with Windows Media Player 10 

Results

3D Mark 2005

            I decided to start off with the standard benchmark for DX9 level cards.  This gave me the first indication that the 7600 GT was going to be something quite special.

            I thought things would be a bit more even, but the 7600 GT simply takes hold of this benchmark and doesn’t let go.  It does have more pixel shading power at 600 MHz and 12 pixel shader pipes than the 6800 GT does at 350 MHz and 16 pipes, but I thought that the extra memory bandwidth on the 6800 GT would even things up a tad.  I was wrong. 

3D Mark 2006

            Not content to let 3D Mark 2005 rule the roost, I decided to see how both of these cards would do against each other with the more complex content of 3D 06.

            Yet again the 7600 GT shows who is boss.  The poor old 6800 GT doesn’t stand a chance.  I was still quite stunned by the way this had turned out so far. 

Doom 3

            This horror number is still a good benchmark for OpenGL performance, and quite a few games out there use the Doom 3 technology.  High quality settings were enabled along with 8X AF.  I put anti-aliasing up to 4X, thinking that again the extra memory bandwidth of the 6800 GT would help it perform more on par with the 7600 GT.  I was a bit more right on this one… but not much.

            The 7600 GT still takes a commanding lead even though the memory bandwidth of the 6800 GT is about 25% higher.  Things get closer at 1600 x 1200, but the other resolutions show the 7600 GT to be much faster. 

F.E.A.R.

            This game takes pretty much every graphics card to its knees, which makes it a wonderful benchmark.  Quality was set to maximum with soft shadows disabled.  AA was set to 2X with 8X AF.  The in-game performance test was used.

            This one isn’t even close.  While at 1600 x 1200 the 6800 GT again comes close, the other resolutions show the 7600 GT to be simply overwhelming.  Having nearly double the framerate at 2048 is very impressive.  This is not unexpected as the 7 series of cards handle resolutions higher than 1600 x 1200 much better than previous generations.

            Average framerates are only part of the story, and I was curious to see how low each of these cards go.  Once framerates go below 30 fps, then things start to get a little choppy.

            The 7600 GT does not dip as far as the older 6800 GT, but things really only stay smooth for it at 1024x768.  Considering that this is a $239 card running at that resolution with 2X AA, its performance is quite admirable in this application.

Next: More Results

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