Gainward's 7900GT/7900GT SLI review
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 16 Mar 2006

The recent launch of three new NVIDIA models gave the most attention to the flagship, the 7900GTX. At the price it is offered, although it is lower than ATI's corresponding model, it can?t hope to become a big seller. This is where 7900GT comes to play. The budget version is based on a same G71 chip, but has more conservative clocks for both memory and the GPU. Thanks to this decrease, the cooling solution is around six times smaller than the GTX?s in size and volume. The GPU works at 450MHz, which is only 20 MHz faster than the 7800GTX. The memory works at 660MHZ (1320 effective speed), which is also slightly higher than the old GTX. We weren?t able to check it here, because we don?t have any 7800GTX cards with us, but we expect 7900GT to have almost the same, if not better performance, especially since 7800GTX is a good overclocker and many manufacturers are offering it with increased clocks. This model will cost around $300 in the US and about ?300 on the European market, which is significantly lower than the old GTX. We talked to some manufacturers here at CeBIT, and found that many are planning to introduce a highly overclocked GT very soon.From what we heard, the increased core clock should be as high as 550 MHz (+100). The card that we tested today comes from Gainward, who was kind enough to provide us with it. We actually got two of the cards, so we will be able to show just how much SLI will deliver in terms of performance increase. As far as the competition from ATI is concerned, the main rivals will be the X1800XL and X1800XT. The XL should be a little slower, while the XT should be a little faster. Tests were run on our standard test configuration: AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ DFI Lanparty SLI-DR OCZ PC-3200, Platinum, rev.2, 2x512 MB Western Digital Raptor 36 GB OCZ Powerstream 520W