The Verdict
Well obviously you knew from the first page already that this small midget would be fast eh ? Yeah it is. I'm not really 100% confident if I would buy the XXX edition though. Don't get me wrong here, this is tremendous performance, but fact is this card is pushed to the maximum. We literally had no room left to overclock, 15 MHz upwards and we'd see lockups. Then again, this card is covered by a two year warranty which is a pretty safe bet. Plus also, when you are not into overclocking and all that's involved with it this might be your solution.
Evidently this is a product and a half for sure. Very impressive.
What you definitely need to bare in mind is that this product is a decent amount faster than the 7800 GTX 512MB and it's priced 150 USD cheaper, so you definitely need to choose the 7900 over a 7800 okay ?
Stability - I uninstall old drivers, insert the card, install new drivers, do a reboot and bam .. everything works as planned. I have much respect for that, as usual everything worked straight out of the box. We did encounter the NVIDIA sentinel clocking down the card on two occasions. Let me explain. We always run a 12 hour stress test on any graphics card and pretty much the GPU clocked down twice during that time-frame. I know, these are rather extreme tests that we do but obviously the card runs very close to it's maximum.
With a card like the 7900 GTX 512 MB you can play your games at 1920x1200 like I do and you do not have to compromise at all. Turn on 4xAA and sixteen levels of anisotropic filtering, the card will still push well over 80 frames per second (on average) in Quake 4 for example. So I really do not need to go into much detail to describe how well games play with this card.
Also do not rule out other functions like SD/HD content (movies/series/multimedia), playback is fantastic with the help of PureVideo (which you need to buy for 20 USD sadly). I'm also sorry to say that this card is not HDCP ready. According to the HDCP specification, high-definition video content that is transported using a HDCP-DVI signal will be encrypted to prevent copying. This means that future encrypted HD media can not be decoded properly with this card. Now I don't know how much of an issue this will really become as not only do we NOT have HDCP content right now, it's cracked already. Still if you are planning to playback HD HDCP protected content over DVI-D -> HDMI, this is something you need to keep in mind.
HDCP support is the biggest flop in the industry right now, that industry should be ashamed of all the fuzz. I do find it a shame that people are buying gear worth hundreds of dollars and euros only to find out that future HD material will output a black screen or a cut off lower resolution playback of the HD content in the near future, that's just nasty.
In combo with the new drivers and PureVideo you can now also decode High Definition H.264 streams. H.264 is a compression algorithm used to transmit video efficiently between endpoints. This algorithm is seen as the replacement for its predecessor, H.263. What is different about H.264 is that it promises to deliver high quality video, H.264 also enables very high quality encoding, producing better results than even MPEG2 and of course HDTV levels.
Okay one more then. Splinter Cell 3 for example still managed to push a steady ~60 FPS with HDR and 16xAF enabled at 1920x1200, man that's freakish to experience!
The card we tested today originated from XFX and it's the "XXX" edition which means it's overclocked straight out of the box for you. It surely did not have a very luxurious software bundle but you do get a game for free. The XFX GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB XXX edition was a feast for the eyes to test and it offers heaps of performance and brings you fantastic gameplay at the highest resolutions.
Great stuff for sure.
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