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Written by Monkeyman
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Sunday, 22 October 2006 |
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Page 2 of 9
With a huge variety of high-end cards currently available there has been a bit of a gap in the mid range sector, the 7800GT appeared briefly and was phased out, the X1800XL never had enough grunt to keep up with the Nvidia based solutions and the X1800XT and 7900GT have never been cost effective enough to be classed as budget cards.
All this has changed with the release of the 7900GS, as you will see in the following write-up it has plenty of stock power to play all but the most intensive of games with relative ease and has some serious overclocking potential to bring it in line with some much more expensive cards.
Specification
Memory: 256MB GDDR running at 1320MHz
Pixel Pipelines: 20
Vertex Shaders: 7
Core speed: 450MHz
The 7900GS looks very similar in specification the the 7800GT cards that have now all but disappeared, it has the same amount of pipelines and shaders and is still a 24 pipeline card with on pixel pipeline quad disabled, however it is based on the same core as the 7900GTX and not the 7800GTX that the 7800GT is based on.
This new core, G71, is produced on the 90nm production process as opposed to the 110nm of previous cards and seems to overclock slightly better than the 7800 series cards as you will see shortly.
The memory on this particular model of card is 1.4ns Samsung memory rated for around 714Mhz (1428Mhz DDR) which is faster at its stock speed of 1320MHz than the memory chips on the 7800GT giving this card an immediate advantage in speed.
Comparison between the 7800GT and the 7900GS:
| Card | Core | Memory Clock (MHz) | Core Clock (MHz) | Pixel Pipelines | Vertex Shaders | | 7800GT | G70 | 1000-1100 | 450 | 20 (Out of 24) | 7 (Out of 8) | | 7900GS | G71 | 1320 | 450 | 20 (Out of 24) | 7 (Out of 8) |
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