There are probably not too many people who would not like to have a GeForce 7900 SLI setup, or a CrossFire X1900XT system. If you’ve got the cash, go live the dream brother! Most of us do not have an unlimited money supply though, and ATI and Nvidia know this. The bulk of their products go to much more mainstream systems, i.e. small office/home office, casual gamer, and budget gamer.
We’re going to look at this budget gamer range today. These are usually the cards that can be found for around $125 – $250. Now there are a couple of options to be had at this range from both ATI and Nvidia. Indeed, the whole GeForce 7x family has no less than 11 currently available card designations, but we are going to look at the 7600 GT.
You may remember the 6600 GT from last generation, and how well it played Doom3, Far Cry, and Half Life 2. Well, the 7600 GT takes a lesson from the same play book. It truly is the sweet spot for GeForce 7. Today we have the EVGA e-GeForce 7600 GT CO on the stage, and we’ll see what she is capable of.
We can see that EVGA has clocked the card up a little from the stock 7600 GT. 20MHz higher on the core and 50MHz higher on the memory. Honestly, this is not a whole lot, but, hey, it’s a freebie! We’re also not entirely sure what the “CO” suffix is for, but I would be willing to bet it is not for Carbon Monoxide. I would like to say that I am impressed EVGA went a little extra distance in saying what minimum Amps they recommend for the +12 volt rail on power supplies. Hardware manufacturers all too often give blanket watt recommendations, but I have seen literally hundreds of power supplies that might be rated for 300 or 400 watts, but have truly anemic amp ratings on the +12V lines. It is very good to see a company be more specific.
Here are the specs, straight from EVGA:
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We are using 3DMark 05 and Aquamark3 to compare the 7600 GT with an ATI Radeon X1600XT, marketed as ATI’s contender in the budget gamer market. Now, Futuremark’s 3DMark has come under a lot of fire in recent years due to companies “tweaking” driver versions specifically for 3DMark, or for Futuremark themselves fiddling with the way drivers behave. There are also some people who feel that it is a non-real-world representation, and refuse to include it in their reviews. While I do see their logic and respect their position, I still think the program has its place, and that when not used to simply try to get the highest score possible, it is an excellent technology and capability demonstrator. For our test system we used:
- Motherboard – Asus A8N nForce4 SLI
- Processor – Athlon 64 X2 3800+
- Memory – Corsair TWINX 2GB DDR400
- Soundcard – Soundblaster X-fi Platinum
- Operating System – Windows XP SP2
- Nvidia drivers – ForceWare 84.15
- ATI drivers – Catalyst 6.7
*all drivers and benchmark settings were left to default
Cutting to the chase, here were the final results:
| Card | 3DMark 05 | Aquamark3 |
| EVGA GeForce 7600GT | 13075 | 73160 |
| PowerColor X1600XT | 7092 | 48486 |
Watching the 7600 GT go through 3DMark was simply thrilling. I had never seen the program run so smoothly on something branded as a budget gamer’s card. Each section of the GPU tests was smooth with the frame rate consistently high. Even on the very demanding “Mother Nature” segment, the 7600 GT muscled its way through. Comparatively, the Radeon card really did look more like something one would consider a “budget card”. Going through most of the tests, the Radeon delivered adequately, but on the more demanding sections, the frame rate would drop way down, and you would start to see the slide-show effect. Once you turn on Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering, both cards take a performance hit, but the GeForce will still have the upper hand at all times. The story was exactly the same for Aquamark3. The 7600 GT soared through every single stage without issue. The Radeon, while doing OK, went much slower; it obviously does not have the muscle of its rival. The numbers speak for themselves.
Conclusion
If you’ve only got $150, but still want a very realistic and rewarding gaming experience, this is the card for you. Period. As much as I do like the Radeon line, the X1600XT simply can’t keep up. On top of that, in a year or two, you’ll likely be able to get 7600 GT’s off of eBay for cheap SLI action (if you have an SLI motherboard of course), so there’s a inexpensive upgrade path for you too. In the interest of full disclosure, it is important to note that at the time of this writing, you can get Radeon x1600xt’s for just a little over $100 USD online. I still say for about $30-$50 more you’ll get a better gaming experience with the 7600 GT, but you should know your options.
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