Many moons ago NVIDIA released their Geforce 6 series, this success product line-up made us forget the rather poor showing the Geforce FX. One of the most popular products starting with the number ?6? was undoubtedly the 6800 GT, striking a good balance between price and performance; The 7800 GT which followed was even more successful, as the performance boost between the 6 and 7 series was quite noticeable, yet a large price jump was not seen, giving you more performance for the same money.


Photo of logo on MSI's 7900 GT Cooler

The 78xx series was short(er) lived however as NVIDIA announced a product line update earlier this year, the 7900 introduced a die shrink, making the chip run cooler and faster, the 7900 GT was introduced at the price of the 7800 GT yet it had the performance of the high end 7800 GTX part (256Mb version). Following in the footsteps of the earlier ?best bang for the buck? products, the 7900 GT proved even worthier as the default clocks speed NVIDIA let it run at were quite modest, and many board partners are selling their 7900 GT cards at overclocked speeds. Today we test four different cards made by MSI, eVGA, Sparkle and Club 3D.



Three out of four cards come factory overclocked, ranging from a modest 50Mhz increase on the Core and 100Mhz on the memory, to an almost GTX like overclock on the 7900 GT version from eVGA.

Sparkle sets itself apart from the rest by upping the onboard memory to 512Mb. Whether or not the extra memory results in an increase in performance we are set to find out.

Let?s take a closer look at each of the video cards in the roundup.

Call of Duty 2

The map Bergstein was used to do this manual run through.

At 1280x1024 we were able to set 4xAA and 8xAF, these are the results



The slightest overclock is quite beneficial for the average FPS, with the eVGA leading the pack; the impact on the min. fps is less stellar.

At 1600x1200 the AA was reduced to 2x to keep the game playable.



The extra memory on the Sparkle 7900 GT translates into a 1 FPS lead over the overclocked Club 3D, nothing to write home about. The eVGA establishes a slightly larger leads this time around with an average FPS equal to the Club 3D at 1280x1024!

The squiggly chart below shows us that the extra 256Mb onboard memory will not translate into noticeable higher FPS in Call of Duty 2



Quake 4

In Quake 4 we used one of the first maps in the game where you need to find a way through trenches to man the large gun to shoot open a door. The Doom 3 engine is used here, which is capped in-game at 60FPS. Even with 4xAA/8xAF enabled at 1600x1200 frame rates remained excellent throughout the level with here and there short dips to ~20FPS.



Even the slightest overclock sees an immediate result in average FPS, the effect of overclocking the GPU is more noticeable than overclocking the memory it seems.

In the 256Mb vs 512Mb battle the outcome has changed, 1 FPS difference is nothing to write home about.

FEAR

This manual run through was used to evaluate performance in this ?office space shooter?, while this game doesn?t offer a colorful game environment it?s packed with high detail textures and cool graphical effects like the bullet-time power-up.

At 1280x1024 4xAA/8xAF could be enabled although you?ll do experience some dips in FPS, the average frame rate remained playable.



At 1600x1200 AA was reduced to 2x which kept frame rates close to those at 1280x1024 with 4xAA.



The average frame rate with the Sparkle is now up ?3? compared to the equally clocked Club 3D, not bad, but as you can see overclocking the GPU will most likely offset any small difference had from the extra memory.



Oblivion

One of the most (if not most!) system taxing games to have come out this year, Oblivion can bring any system to its knees when the in-game details are set to maximum values. We set the texture to high, every option to ?on? and the sliders were left in the middle except for: Tree Fade (more to the left ? lower) , Actor Fade (more to the right ? higher), View Distance (set to highest), In/Ext Shadows (set to almost lowest), Self Shadow (off), Bloom (off).

HDR was enabled which on nVIDIA hardware disables anti aliasing. The game section chosen was outside running walking from the mountains towards the main gate with the big tower in plain view. You can view an in-game recording of the manual run-through here.



The impact of extra GPU power is only minimal this time, unless you radically set higher speeds like seen with the eVGA card.



Average frame rates drop for all video cards, the game was not very playable at this resolution; only with the eVGA card the FPS remained high enough throughout the manual run through to be called fluent.

256Mb vs 512Mb: while the average and minimum values don?t seem to differ much, the squiggly chart actually becomes useful here, as you can see that the Sparkle delivers higher frame rates in this game; not +10FPS, but a small edge nonetheless.

Futuremark

While both ATI and NVIDIA are known to have fiddled with their drivers in the past to get higher Futuremark scores making the results less reliable, there is still some value to be found when looking at the results. The latest drivers from NVIDIA are verified by Futuremark for not tinkering with image quality to get higher scores, so what you see is what you get: the best quality without any tricks.

When the first 3DMark2001SE was released there was a consensus that a score of >2500 would result in playable frame rates with games released that same year. This score versus playability balance with real world games might have suffered in the next releases of 3DMark but it?s still a good guideline to get an idea of how your system (and VGA card) performs.



In 3DMark2001SE the difference between the cards is none existent, the bottle neck here is not the VGA card. 3DMark03 is more GPU dependant and here a score difference can be clearly seen, they are all high enough to ensure you that you can play older games at (super) high detail settings.



3DMark05 and 3DMark06 are more recent benchmarks from Futuremark and here we see lower scores and a larger impact of the GPU overclock. The lowest score of 3892 in 3DMark06 for the Club 3D 7900 GT which runs at reference clock speeds means that at 1280x1024 without AA/AF you will be able to play modern games without problem. Something which can not always be said from the mid-range cards like the 7600GT which scores noticeably lower at 2926.

While the Futuremark benchmarks cannot be relied on 100% to reflect real-world gameplay they are still a good starting point to evaluate performance and combined with real games can give you a decent idea what the hardware is capable of.

3DMark can also be successfully used to evaluate the effect of overclocking?


Overclocking

Each card used its own cooler, with a ambient temperature of 27?C here in the summer this will have an effect on the maximum stable overclocks. With a third party heatsink you will stand a better chance of getting higher clock speeds, although the increase over maximum clocks with the reference cooling versus the custom air cooled solutions will not be too shocking.

In the chart below you can see the percentage increase we were able to get from GPU and Memory over stock speeds.



The Club 3D is clocked at NVIDIA reference speeds to begin but had quite a bit of headroom, coming in on a tied 2nd with MSI on the maximum Core speed of 570Mhz and taking 2nd place on the memory overclock, which climbed all the way up to an impressive 900Mhz which is faster than the memory on the 7900 GTX (800Mhz).

The Sparkle only overclocked a few % although it featured the biggest cooling solution, the MSI proved to be a little better on the GPU but the memory was almost near its maximum speed.

While the factory overclock on the eVGA is quite amazing, it was even more a surprise to see how well it still overclocked past this speed, reaching 680Mhz on the core, which is 30Mhz more than the 7900 GTX! The memory also hit a high at 910Mhz, simply stunning.



3DMark2001SE is definitely bottlenecked by the CPU here, while 3DMark06 shows an impressive gain for all video cards.

Since the 7900 GT has no pipe lines cut and is basically a down-clocked GTX with less onboard memory, it?s good to see these cards pack quite an overclocking-punch. If you are an adventurous type and don?t mind to change the stock cooling and voltage modifications, you will see that the 7900 GT has a lot of potential to reach speeds well beyond GTX specifications. (Volt mod Guide , another one)

Noise&Temps

A dBA meter was placed at the side panel of the case at 20cm, the ambient noise without VGA card was ~37.5dBA. The GPU was stressed using 3DMark06 loops of the HDR tests, the maximum temperature reached was recorded. Room temperature was ~27?C.



Yes you?ve read that right, the eVGA runs at a worryingly high ~95?C, the high overclock does take its toll on the slightly larger than reference design cooler. It would be beneficiary to the VGA card?s health if a larger cooler was used to keep this overclocked card cool. The reference design of the Club 3D is sufficient to keep the card below 80?C, the MSI does better but makes slightly more noise.

In a VGA cooler roundup we did in April 2006 using a 7800 GT we ran into a problem with the fan controller on the VGA card, it simply came down to this: it didn?t work. The fan ran at 100% all the time, no matter how many times drivers were installed from scratch or how many times the system was rebooted/reset. Unfortunately it seems that this problem has not gone away with the 7900 GT, the fan controllers on three out of four cards refused to throttle the fan when in 2D mode, keeping the fan spin at 100% and resulting in the high dBA readings seen in the chart above.

The Sparkle Calibre throttled its fan speed successfully, and its heatsink was extremely efficient, keeping the GPU at 65?C and this at only a ~3dBA increase over ambient! But we might have just been lucky with the Sparkle who?s fan control did seem to work, as it appears to be a random thing, for some it works, for others it doesn?t. We recommend you do fresh Windows reinstall before you throw in the towel though as this has worked for us in the past with some of the 7800 GT cards. Not for the three 7900 GT cards in this test unfortunately.

If a fan running at 100% isn?t loud enough, it gets worse, on some cards the capacitors at rear of the cards will start to make a high pitched ?tjirping? noise when running 3D (games/applications). There are several threads on internet forums with users trying to find out what is causing this noise, here?s one over at XtremeSystems.org. No clear answer on what?s causing this is to be found.

Neither Club 3D, MSI or Sparkle made this high pitched noise, but the eVGA one did, asking eVGA about it, they said it was a small chance you?ll end with a card which makes noise like that, and you can RMA it if this noise is bothersome.

More on 7900 GT RMA and conclusive thoughts on the next page ->

7900 series ?factory overclocked? issues?

In May 2006 HardOCP published an article titled ?GeForce 7900 Inferno ? Burn Baby Burn? which discussed the experience end users were having with their factory overclocked 7900 video cards. It seemed that a larger than normal percentage was failing and dying for ?no apparent? reason. One of the most noticeable signs was artifacts appearing in the ?Deep Freeze? benchmark run in 3DMark06, followed by random graphical glitches in games and finally the video card completely failing to display any image.

EVGA is hard at work to provide the best possible service for the end user, no matter what the issue. They have released new information about product updates which help to eradicate the chance of failure on their 7900 product line. It seems though that the product failure is not directly related to the higher factory overclocks as these "artifacting" problems can pop up on any 7900 card out there, which leads us to believe there might have been a problem with the reference design. The RMA percentage for EVGA is slightly higher than previous generation products but still nothing too worrying.

EVGA has done a product update for their 7900 series in the US, more info on this can be found here at their support forums

Some end users have already profited from this new update and they send out their faulty product and got a new card back the next day. This is one user?s comment:

So do these factory overclocked units exhibit a higher failure rate than those running at reference clocks speeds? No hard proof can be found to validate that statement. EVGA has been quite open about their RMA figures and while they may have spiked back in May, the current return rate now is back to normal for a high end video card series. Other manufacturers are more tight lipped about exact numbers but we?ll try to investigate and get back to you with more numbers;

Conclusive Thoughts

The 7900 GT is a very capable GPU which will give you the needed frame rate to enjoy the latest games at high(er) detail, but which one will suite you best? The standard clock speeds of the 7900 GT are surely enough for it to be quick, Club 3D which runs at reference speeds offers you a solid product at a good price. Yet for a mere ?10 more you can get a factory overclocked MSI NX7900GT-VT2D256 which gives you a small to average boost in most games, the extra price is not exaggerated to get the guaranteed higher clock speeds.

The Sparkle Calibre and EVGA 7900 GT KO Superclocked are on the other end of the price scale, the EVGA costs ?100 more than the Club 3D but comes with clock speeds which put it in well ahead performance wise. If you are looking for a guaranteed high overclocking VGA card, this card from EVGA surely fits the bill.

The Sparkle Calibre with its modest overclock doesn?t quite validate its higher asking price, the extra 256Mb memory didn?t really pay off in performance, making it an unnecessary cost for the whole. On the plus side it was the only product in the roundup which guaranteed silence even at 100% fan speed, which is certainly commendable.

We hope we have highlighted the better and worse sides of each product tested today so you can make an informative decision if you decide to upgrade to the 7900 GT series.

We like to thank Ilona from MSI, Aline from EVGA and Yuri from Forcom (Sparkle) for lending the products for test.

Questions/Comments: forum thread