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GeForce 7600 GT OC a.k.a. G73
When introduced back in March 2006 (yeah it has almost been a year already) I told you guys that Geforce 7600 series would become really popular. And that surely was an understatement. ATI at that moment had nothing ready to compete with the overall performance of this product.
The GeForce 7600 GT is still a highly competitive product in the mid-range segment of the consumer market. Armed with the development codename G73, the chip again was made on the newer 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 the GeForce 7600 GT silicon.
You receive a graphics processor with 12 fully fetched pixel pipelines running (reference) at a 560 MHz frequency with five active vertex processors. The product has eight ROPs. The memory however is still 128-bit whereas I wish it would have been boosted to 256-bit by now. But it's really fast clocked memory specifically 1400 MHz (2x700 again for reference) and that is looking to be quite okay in my eyes.
Mind you that the XFX model as tested today has different (better) clocks. We'll explain later.
The card is targeted at a very wide audience with a sales price of 169 USD. The introduction of the 7600 series made another remarkable step in that they all are 256MB memory versions and thus the mid-range segment has moved on to that amount of memory as standard.
Now the XFX Fatality XXX version videocards specifically then, this is a pre-overclocked GeForce 7600 GT which offers higher than reference core and memory frequencies. As stated, NVIDIAs recommended clock speeds are 560 MHz GPU and 1.4 GHz memory for the GeForce 7600 GT series of cards. XFX has this card fully warranted for two years and pre-overclocked (default) at 650 MHz GPU and 1.6 GHz memory.
Okay so that's a nice overclock hey, and every little bit helps right ? That memory is 256MB in total and carries the popular GDDR3 flavor. The GeForce 7600 works on a 128-bit memory bus.
The 7600 GT has one dual-link DVI connector and one single-link DVI connector. Dual-link DVI allows extremely high resolution gaming up-to 2560x1600 (XHD as the industry would love to call that = Extreme High Definition) and all the sweetness in the form of HDR support and that final standard Shader Model 3.
This Fatality model card comes in two flavors:
- NVIDIA GEFORCE 7600 GT FATAL1TY 256MB RoHS 560 MHz (PV-T73G-U1F4), 560 MHz core / 700 (x2) Memory.
- NVIDIA GEFORCE 7600 GT FATAL1TY 256MB RoHS 650 MHz (PV-T73G-U1D4), 650 MHz core / 800 (x2) Memory.
Included in the box you'll find next to the XFX GeForce 7600 GT Fatality 256MB graphics card this lot:
- The graphics card (model PV-T73G-U1D4)
- DVI -> VGA dongle
- SVIDEO cable
- Quick install guide
- Driver CD, which includes NVIDIA® ForceWare unified graphics drivers, Full installation manual .pdf
The 7600 GT has SLI support, so in a later stage you can connect two of these puppies on an SLI mainboard and double up performance. The bundle is mediocre; no HD 3-way RCA bracket. Just the graphics card, SVideo cable, VGA dongle, drivers and manual.
We can discuss all day about this, yet XFX clearly did this to keep the sales price down. So is that a bad thing ? The product as tested today costs just 170 EUR in the stores right now. Last thing you should know, your warranty is 2 years.
