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GeForce 7600 GS up-close and personal

Armed with the development codename G73, the 7600 GS chip was made on the a 90nm fabrication process. For a mid-range product it has a rather large transistor count, no less than 177 million transistors can be found on both the GeForce 7600 GS and GT silicon.

You might ask what's different on this card compared to the GT then ?

It's a valid question and we'll answer it. Get this, 12 pixel pipelines running at a 400 MHz frequency (GT is pushing 540 MHz) with five active vertex processors. Again the product has eight ROPs. The memory however is still 128-bit whereas I hoped it would have been boosted to 256-bit. But it's really fast clocked 1.2ns DDR3 memory namely 1400 MHz (2x700) which is similar to the GT and way less than the standard GS series have. That is looking to be quite okay in my eyes. Judging from the specifications this product should be able to compete with the middle segment of current mid-range graphics cards such as the GeForce 6800 GT/7600GT.

The card is targeted at a very wide audience with a sales price of roughly 125 USD, which is a good price considering the product even comes with a non-reference cooler and the voltage tweak software. I expect prices to fall even further though. This product is a 256MB version as mid-range is now moving on to that amount of memory.

Just like the 7600 GT; the 7600 GS has SLI support also.

Allow me to place everything in a chart to understand the technology behind the 7600 GS a tad better:

Please focus on the chart below where I cite the more important specifications. Highlighted in blue you'll notice the BioStar product specs.

GeForce 6800 Ultra

16

6

256-bit

GDDR3/256MB

400MHz

1100MHz

GeForce 6800 GT

16

6

256-bit

GDDR3/256MB

350MHz

1000MHz

GeForce 6800

12

5

256-bit

GDDR/128MB

325MHz

700MHz

GeForce 6800 LE

8

4

256-bit

GDDR/128MB

320MHz

700MHz

As you can see BioStar did some interesting stuff with this GS, it has a much faster memory clock which brings the product VERY close to the 50 bucks more expensive 7600 GT.

Not exactly a star bundle

Now we always mention what candy you get included in the box. One card, 100% reference,  with a manga kind of looking cooler. Furthermore a quick-manual and Driver CD and a HDTV component connector.

That's it. Yes a very average bundle.

Watt Did You Say? 

The dreaded word in the industry: power consumption.

What we always do with new graphics' cards, we measure the wattage peak with the help of a wattage meter. Slight side note, you are looking at the overall usage of the entire PC. The meter is placed between the power connector and the PSU. So please understand that using a Wattage meter is not the most reliable way of measuring power consumption. You basically look at how much power is the power circuit from your house pulling from the PSU. So you need to look at the results as being an indication and not an exact science.

Let's have a look at the power consumption:

The methodology: we simply look at the peak Wattage during a 3DMark05 session to verify power consumption. You are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC. The 7600 GS graphics card consumes less than 75 Watts at peak during 3D gaming.

I suggest

What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:

• bad 3D performance
• crashing games
• spontaneous resetting PC
• freezes during gameplay
• PSU overload can cause it to break down

So many things can happen.

	An example of how we measure.